Avoid News, Part 2: What the Stock Market Taught Me about News

I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?<p>I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.<p>I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.<p>And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.

Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?<p>I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.<p>My current philosophy is to treat news&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;social media like email in the old days.<p>That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.<p>The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.

I feel like this post has a lot of hindsight bias in it. People are going to get things wrong sometimes. I think there&#x27;s a lot of things to legit criticize mainstream media for, but not having 100% accurate crystal ball isn&#x27;t one of them.<p>If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.

Bill Ackman runs a hedge fund and was a guest on CNBC right at the beginning of the US getting hit with the pandemic proclaiming travel industry going to go downhill while having made bets on that happening. [0] For those outside the US, CNBC is a business&#x2F;financial&#x2F;stock market news channel.<p>&gt; “America will end as we know it. I’m sorry to say so, unless we take this option,” he told CNBC on March 18, five days before ending his bet against the market. “We need to shut it down now. ... This is the only answer.”<p>He then made $2B a week later. I would assume most guests on that network are there to make statements to try and sway the market in some way to their favor. You just don&#x27;t know if they are long or short on whatever they are talking about so without those disclosures.<p>If you think more online based news is better like Motley Fool. They are also registered as a Hedge Fund with the SEC [1]. I can&#x27;t see&#x2F;find what their specific holdings are on the SEC site but isn&#x27;t that a conflict of interest to publish &quot;news&quot; or investment information and manage over $100M?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;bill-ackman-exits-market-hedges-uses-2-billion-he-made-to-buy-more-stocks-including-hilton.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;bill-ackman-exits-market-hed...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;browse&#x2F;?CIK=1512814" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;browse&#x2F;?CIK=1512814</a>

Ignoring news outright seems like a terrible idea for the stock market. Focus more on objective news, especially from areas that impact stocks. In Jan. 2020, once news came out about Chinese factories shutting down and whole cities being locked down, it was pretty easy to see the effect that would have on the market. Now, I definitely didn&#x27;t foresee amazon and tech&#x27;s meteoric rise, but it wasn&#x27;t hard to predict what would happen in other areas.

The data doesn&#x27;t seem right, wasn&#x27;t the opioid epidemic pretty well covered in the media, even in 2016? Or did that not meet some criteria?

+1 for using the term &quot;storytellers&quot;. I call &quot;journalists&quot; Schreiberlinge in German, which has a similar conotation. If I have learnt one thing during the pandemic, that even supposedly serious media is not to be trusted. I always knew (from first hand experience of being interviewed) that newspapers are really not much more worth then other things you use to whipe stuff... After the pandemic, I know you can basically ignore all the media outlets. All they do is generate interactions and spread badly researched lies.

If you don&#x27;t trust news sources, why would you trust this person?<p>At least news sources have editorial processes, reputations, trained, experienced, professional journalists. They aren&#x27;t perfect, but they&#x27;re much better than random bloggers.

I mostly avoid the news. However opinion articles on newspapers bother me a lot. The fact is most people will interpret these articles as the newspapers own view, increasingly so when this view is repeated again and again. However when you point out the typical faults of the opinion article then defenders insist it&#x27;s &#x27;just an opinion&#x27;. On a related note I hated an opinion article that came out of the guardian yesterday debunking the theory that that the Wuhan lab was responsible for covid-19. The main reason being it totally ignored all the evidence and just smugly insisted it wasn&#x27;t true. It&#x27;s fine to disagree but let&#x27;s hear the reasons why.<p>I generally avoid all newspapers. The Economist does seem better.

Reading news is an addictive habit with the downside of strong political indoctrination. I could see it in some of my family members, unfortunately.<p>I really would like to have a tool that can automatically put labels on news headers: clickbait, drama, speculation, she-said-he-said, or rumor. It&#x27;s pretty easy to detect such headlines when reading, so training an ML model shouldn&#x27;t be a problem. Removing tagged articles automatically would&#x27;ve made my news feed so much better.

If you actually speak to journalists they&#x27;re very honest about how their job isn&#x27;t reporting facts but it&#x27;s interpreting the information and reporting it in a way with omissions or embellishments that make sure the general public, whom they look down on, have the correct takeaway from the story.<p>They see themselves as the chosen few who&#x27;s job it is to do this and who&#x27;s job it is to make the general public think and believe the things that are best for them and the believe it&#x27;s a privilege to be in the position that they are to be in charge of doing that and are proud that is what they do.

&gt; I also looked at charts of its stock price. I saw signs that sellers were less patient than buyers. That usually indicates an ordinary fluctuation in business, but whatever, it counted as evidence that I could safely postpone buying, so I decided to wait<p>Any traders in the audience care to shed some light on how they would go about this?

Remember the CTS Labs thing where some Israelis from across the hall from Intel’s facility there did a giant smear job on a fake AMD vulnerability and then Bloomberg picked it up? The same Bloomberg who sells little information services which people are supposed to rely on as conveying factual information?

Great read, I&#x27;d love to see a 2020 version of that World in Data infographic.

&gt; Doing so helped me to make lots of money in the second half of 2020 betting on pandemic-sensitive stocks (not Hertz), since most investors were too pessimistic about vaccines for much of that period<p>Sounds like a Monday-morning quarterback to me. I am guessing he lost money as the maret crashed due to covid unless he was in cash. if he truly had a sure-fire system of filtering out bad narratives, he would have gotten out before the crash in jan-feb as the virus was getting media attention, and then bought near the bottom. He would have known beforehand that Covid was different from SARS or Bird Flu and sold, anticipating a crash.

I take umbrage at the use of the word storytelling to describe news media. Stories have narrative arcs of growth and resolution. Most of what the author is talking about is a repetitive information game with society, a form of social entertainment that hooks people into a feeling of participation. The “narratives” of the day are better described (as they’re coming to be) as memes.

WSB woke many retail folk up to this hard reality: you&#x27;re being manipulated &amp; exploited far more than you think.<p>And once that genie is out, there&#x27;s no going back.

The idea to avoid the news and that news are biased is not new nor revolutionary. But I like this “information arbitrage” idea — most people get their news from X, Y, Z so if you can research an event more objectively you maybe able to profit from it.

&quot;Whereas today, we have storytellers that specialize in peddling outrage.&quot;<p>I&#x27;d guess that media has known for ever that outrage is a potent driver of engagement. Technology today enables outrage delivery to be highly sculpted and surgically delivered. In my opinion this is a major driver of the increasing polarization of America.<p>The depth of our natural predilection to focus on threats has been discovered by neural networks and their systems optimized for profit, not truth and relevance.

Has anyone got the link to the original PDF?<p>The link on the previous post is broken: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dobelli.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dobelli.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;Avoid_News_Par...</a>

I previously made a post about this topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galambo.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;avoid-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galambo.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;avoid-news&#x2F;</a>

It seems to me like it would be prudent anyway just to keep track of the news everyone else is still consuming, if you don&#x27;t know what other people base their views and decisions on it becomes pretty hard to predict their behaviour.

There&#x27;s so much cynicism in this thread and lots of forcing everything into black and white. It&#x27;s not black and white, life isn&#x27;t black and white. Are there TV stations that show programs disguised as news to promote an agenda and make money? Of course. Are there news outlets working hard to to cover stories that are legitimate publications? Absolutely. Just because OP points out a few cases where media is wrong doesn&#x27;t make it all shit that should just be ignored. That&#x27;s fucking childish. Part of growing up is learning to think, and it is really, really hard, and takes work. But it seems lots of people here want everything pre-digested and handed to them on a platter saying: this is true and this is false.

Reading this story makes me draw the opposite conclusions to the author. Instead of ignoring the news let’s pay attention to it, and then do the opposite of what the storytellers are recommending.

r&#x2F;WSB woke many retail folk up to this hard reality: you&#x27;re being manipulated &amp; exploited far more than you think.<p>And once that comes into light for an individual, there&#x27;s no going back.

WSB woke many retail folk up to this hard reality: you&#x27;re being manipulated &amp; exploited far more than you think.<p>And once that comes into light for an individual, there&#x27;s no going back.

Does anyone have an archive link to the original &quot;avoid news&quot; blog post? Looks like it&#x27;s a 404 now.

If you read the news, you are misinformed. If you don&#x27;t read the news, you are uninformed.

This guy <i>clearly</i> does not read the news.<p>He thinks the pandemic did not have much impact on the economy. He reads right wing economists. He was upset Trump was painted as dangerous. Is this supposed to be an example of being “free from the storytellers”? It just proved he is blindsided by reducing his news sources to a few very biased channels.

&gt; Doing so helped me to make lots of money in the second half of 2020 betting on pandemic-sensitive stocks (not Hertz), since most investors were too pessimistic about vaccines for much of that period.<p>You can make money by betting against politically-motivated &quot;common wisdom&quot;. Trump said the vaccines would be ready before 2021, and everyone else said it was impossible. Some said it could take two years. That became the common wisdom. But in this case they were wrong, and the stock market roared back when the results were released right after the election.<p>Many people realized Trump had a clear motive to shade the truth on vaccine readiness, but they didn&#x27;t realize that anyone who opposed to Trump had a motive to shade it in the opposite direction.

Ignorance is bliss and all that

The comments here reflect a lot of backlash against mainstream media. To some extent, I could see it being a simple reflection of the media being drawn toward bad but eye-catching stories. I&#x27;ve heard from many outlets that the media is drawn to this because it&#x27;s lucrative - and the rise of technology disrupted their traditional funding sources. Pissing people off through their stories wound up being the only way to make money. It&#x27;d only be natural then that after decades of swinging towards &quot;birdbox stories&quot; the media would itself be associated with the negative emotions it&#x27;s been living off (as in the movie where people use a birds in a box to sense when overpowering forces are nearby). If you live off someone else&#x27;s largess then you quickly become associated with them intimately.<p>The trouble is, journalism does fill a necessary need within society. Frankly, people are going to &quot;talk&quot; and without someone having a reputation for holding themselves to a standard somewhere the &quot;talk&quot; will back the ruling elite&#x27;s objectives.<p>I don&#x27;t have the systemic answer - but tech being the initial problem and this being a good place to discuss technical issues - the people here could probably figure out some potential options and see what springs forth.<p>Personally, I learned how to read the news in public school and through cross sampling from multiple outlets. Every story&#x27;s got to answer the five &quot;W&quot;s (who, what, when, where and why). If a story has similar photos&#x2F;names&#x2F;content across multiple outlets then that&#x27;s probably close to what happened. Over time, I&#x27;ve watched the rise of the &quot;birdbox&quot; stories and developed a thicker skin towards them.<p>More personally, I grew up with a parent and a large set of relatives who wanted to rebel against anything and everything without any need for justification. Sometimes it&#x27;s because it makes them look smart and they like how people treat them with authority. Sometimes it&#x27;s because they were wronged by someone in authority somewhere and rebellion feels like a form of righting a perceived wrong. Definitely, if a conspiracy theory landed in their laps they were receptive <i>especially</i> when there wasn&#x27;t any evidence - just another way of bucking the trend and rebelling.<p>I&#x27;ve learned these rebellions are fundamentally destructive. Society would quickly get turned over to something more like Mad Max and regional warlords if my rebellious family were in the majority. Though sometimes society definitely is in the wrong - as in the times of slavery or oppression of women (neither of those is a US-only past practice, btw).<p>The news does fill a fundamental need even in its current state. But it definitely needs reformation. Probably, there&#x27;s a way to fund proper journalism without burning the house down.

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This subject feels like the mirror subject to the question that was discussed on HN 2 days ago: &quot;Do we live in political echo chambers?&quot;<p>My response: Who cares? I know what my values are, I know which side I&#x27;m on, I know what I fight for.<p>If you&#x27;re looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:<p>1. fiction<p>2. history<p>I don&#x27;t think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.<p>In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I&#x27;ve read over the last year:<p>Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0812979303&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books&#x2F;dp...</a><p>Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Security&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0393352285&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Se...</a><p>The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-Project&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0805090169&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&amp;keywords=the+limits+of+power&amp;qid=1623686223&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-...</a><p>The Emergence of China: From Confucius to the Empire, by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Emergence-China-Confucius-Ancient-Context&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1936166356&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=the+emergence+of+china&amp;qid=1623686252&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Emergence-China-Confucius-Ancient-Con...</a><p>Azar Nafisi&#x27;s book is both a true life action story, and it&#x27;s also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.<p>Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era&#x27;s own explosion of religious extremism.<p>Andrew J. Bacevich&#x27;s book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military<p>The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.<p>Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It&#x27;s ridiculous. It&#x27;s a category error. That&#x27;s now what the daily newspaper is for. That&#x27;s certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.<p>Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.<p>But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.

A more sound piece of life advice: avoid libertarians.

lol no one cares about heart diease even though it kills a lot of people