This message goes out to anyone who made changes to their investments based on reports from the financial media. Of course this is many of us.
It’s crazy because the financial media is about entertainment, not information. They exist for one reason only: to sell advertising space.
The primary focus isn't to help you make money.
If you make any financial decisions based on news service predictions of trade wars or a recession – you’re so far off base in your thinking that you should immediately disengage from managing your money and get a professional to do it for you.
These networks have to produce 24 hours of talk every day. Unfortunately 90% of what they publish is useless.
The actual information they produce is short-term and nonproductive at best. It’s focused on fixing things that aren’t broken and useless headlines that only make money for brokerage firms.
The mainstream financial forecasts take no responsibility when they’re wrong. Rarely do they report anything about the outcomes of their calls.
And when they finally have a guest who knows what he or she is talking about, you can’t hear their ideas over the television debate that goes back and forth.
A good example of unnecessary comment on markets is with elections. What we need to learn from an election isn’t who won or why…it’s that the media, especially the financial media, show how totally unlikely a market effect is.
The only workable investment approach for the average guy is a long-term strategy based on solid fundamentals that allows the market to be a market… a market that no one can accurately predict and that (based on decades of real data) will inevitably go up.