From Michael Pascoe at The New Daily: I have a confession to make: for a quarter of a century it was my job to provide daily financial market reports of one kind or another. Like all other daily financial markets reports, they were mostly rubbish. It was the usual grind of reporting this up a bit, that down a bit, occasionally something up or down quite a lot, once in a while an explosion of some kind. But mostly those daily reports were about as useful for investors as yesterday’s weather was for deciding whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. Most of those reports were “noise” — they don’t add up to much at all. For traders, by the time the media reports market movements, they are too late to matter. For investors, the unit of time – a day – is too short to matter. And market reporting is worse now. Taking a daily snapshot of what happened was one thing, but with “liv e ” reporting and 24-hour business channels, the constant gyrations have to be made to seem more dramatic to get a...
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