Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | W | Women's Quarterly

Don''t watch CNBC in broad daylight: James K. Glassman advises us to track stocks by decades, not days.

Article Excerpt
AFTER SIX YEARS writing a twice-weekly financial column for the Washington Post, I decided to quit. I thought I was getting redundant. My pieces tried to teach investors the fundamentals, and, truth is, there is only so much to say. I had written 400 columns, and I was repeating myself. I was grateful to learn afterwards that my readers disagreed. Many of them said they missed me. They apparently liked to read over and over that they should buy and hold (it is a lesson not learned in one sitting).

But my experience points out the basic problem of financial journalism: Done well, it's not all that exciting. Television, however, needs to be exciting, otherwise viewers will change the channel and watch wrestling or Jerry Springer. So CNBC, CNNfn, FOX News, and the rest try hard to make the stock market exciting, and, in the process, they often do investors a terrible disservice.

The ticker is the trouble. It dominates the programs and sets the tone. Hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, the anchors, reporters, and analysts on the shows obsess about what the market is doing in the shortest of the short term ("We seem to have leveled off here on the Nasdaq over the past fifteen minutes after falling in the first hour of trading"). They have to. The model, after all, is sports, and you can't imagine a sports announcer ignoring the score. But, of course, investing is not a short-term game, and the score at any moment means nothing....

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!