The Ignorant Investor

I tend to zone in and out on the financial press. Watching CNBC, reading the journals, market related blogs- these things I do for fun. You can do all of it if you like, but I don't think it hurts performance to largely ignore it.

When I think back over the past 5 years of the market, in my category of "things I wish I would have caught" are two opportunities: the rise in small caps and the boom for defense contractors. However, I don't remember any articles telling me at the time that these areas were heading for a boom. And even if there were such articles, I don't think I would have noticed them among the thousands of articles, analyst reports, online discussions, and blog posts listing all the other possible trends in the market.

Among all that is written in the market in any given day, we know that some of it will be dead on. The problem is, we don't know which articles are the "right" ones. So what's the utility of reading them? I've been reading articles about the upcoming imminent recession for five years. They didn't turn out to be right, even though they were written by very smart people. I also remember lots of articles prior to 2000 about how the "new paradigm" meant the Dow could go far higher than 11,000-12,000. And in every year afterwards, the same predictions of "Dow 15,000" or "Dow 20,000" pop up, all supported by very rational reasoning. One of these days, the writer will be right. But who this mysterious writer is and when he will write this article, and, more importantly, whether I'll read it when it comes up and then, even more importantly, act on it, is the question I could really use an answer to.

So for now I'm cutting back on watching CNBC and reading market-oriented blogs and the Wall Street Journal. If anyone except me was reading this blog, I'd probably tell them to skip it and read "People" or "Woodworking Monthly" instead.