I don't mean to pick on the financial media. They are part of a much bigger problem.
The securities industry is premised on the flawed assumption that they can add value. In reality, as many investors now understand, the value they add is to their own bottom line at the expense of the investors they profess to serve.
The financial media plays an important role in perpetuating this myth. I am not just referring to Jim Cramer and Fast Money. These shows do incalculable damage to those investors who still believe the insights and predictions of these pundits are anything more than musings of narcissistic personalities.
The more traditional media is not much better. Their daily grist consists of "analysis" geared to justify their selection du jour of stocks to buy or mutual funds that are likely to outperform. Investors who rely on these predictions suffer the consequences.
If the financial media couldn't predict the worst recession in a generation, why would you rely on them for advice about what the future holds?
In this week's video, I discuss how reliance on the financial media is bad for your financial health. It is the untold story of how the media and securities industry work together to separate you from your money.
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Do NOt Believe anything you see in the news
If a product is advertised, that means there is a different brand not advertising with a better product
It's gotten to the point that anything you see on tv is a deception or an out and out lie
gold is the place to be when drops 40% in value in 3 months.
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A globally diversified portfolio like the one I illustrated in my comment would own stock in almost 17,000 companies, with a combined market value of over $20 trillion, sales of over $25 trillion, net profits of $240 billion, engaged in over 440 industries and doing business in 192 countries. That is pretty diversified!
Oh, just leave it in the stock market another 90 years and it will spring up in value.
I stopped listening to the media years ago and just do some leg work.
It's no different than the other corporate medias which won't bite the corporate hands that feed them millions of advertising dollars. After all, media doesn't exist to inform or entertain, they don't make any money off of that. They exist to sell advertising.
If you torture the numbers long enough, they always confess!
The money going into the market has to equal the money coming out (with the exception of dividends paid by corporations to owners).
So if you see someone who makes lots of money in the market, that is actually someone else's money.
But the good news for them is, the whole gets charged fees each year!
I am certainly not suggesting that investors have an all stock portfolio or that past returns are predictive of future returns. The point of my illustration was simply to demonstrate that, during this period, the financial media was predicting economic disaster while the reality turned out to be quite different.
As with your "selective" dates and "selective" portfolio" ... for every "selective" instance you cite of the financial media predicting doom, I'll bet I can find 100 at the same time where they predicted either continued prosperity or that it was just around the corner. Even today I think the good news, continually imbued with the "buy and hold forever" mantra, far outweighs the bad. Since its inception, CNBC's occasional "fair and balanced" Bull vs. Bear debates were sorry jokes ... with the talking head making the bear case usually identified as a "perma-bear" with snickering implications that they were nut cases who were missing out on all the money-making fun.