STREET DOGS: News is dangerous but ignorance is disastrous
The art of investing is not about figuring out what has already happened, but about anticipating the future
“My job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. But we don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think for ourselves.” — Warren Buffett.
“The media select, they interpret, they emotionalise and they create facts. The media not only reduce reality by lowering information density. They focus reality by accumulating information where actually none exists. A typical stock market report looks like this: Stock X increased because ... Index Y crashed due to ... Price Z continues to rise after ... Most of these explanations are post-hoc rationalisations. An artificial logic is created, based on a simplistic understanding of the markets, which implies that there are simple explanations for most price movements; that price movements follow rules which then lead to systematic patterns; and, of course, that the news disseminated by the media decisively contributes t...
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