The News

There is no real reason to watch it.

I have been watching a little financial news every morning for about…twenty years. Every morning, nothing changes. What does change is something called interest rates.

The funny thing about interest is that they never really matter. They only matter unless you are buying or selling a house. So, people tend to stay locked into the news for that. But the news, as you are a young person, wants to trick you into thinking that the analyst of the DOW or the NASDAQ or the S&P 500 or some MILITARY ACTION somewhere in the world will affect your portfolio, but it never does.

Every single brainless person in the country still trudges off to work, grinds out their eight to 12-hour day, sticks their pennies in their IRAs, then comes home. So, the news has no effect on anything.

People who have extreme financial expertise, like me, watch the news a little more carefully to see if something like the airs of a recession are on the way. However, even I, who have, well, whatever I have, do not tend to care because it will not affect anything in my life. I am simply curious. That is where the news comes in. It satisfies people’s curiosity.

Most younger professionals, in their 20’s and 30’s, think actual information can be derived. Unfortunately, they are completely incorrect since all the stock analysts are just throwing darts at a board as they always have.

I genuinely wanted to believe the hype. I was maybe 33, fresh from my first finance job, and I watch a little news, expecting it to give me something useful. So, I watched for about two weeks. I quickly picked up on the fact that…wow…nothing there. It had no effect on anything. It was there…to just be a placeholder in the minds of people who did not understand how finance worked.

So, I switched the dial off, and just moved on.

It is too bad that even information that is labelled as important has become an illusion, but it has. If you get a good analysis on any given day, you have struck gold. Now I do see an interview here and there, maybe once a month, that I say, “How about that, that was worth watching.” But that is once a month. And typically, I have better ways to spend my time. Plus, I am not in the business of building a stack of cash to the sky. Most people are.

I think that is funny too. That stack of cash to the sky? Maybe they do not realize the sky cannot be reached by something as flimsy as currency printed through governments that can be toppled in a moment’s notice, including our own.