I wanted to start off tonight’s report by explaining how I interpret all the talking heads on CNBC, financial columns on websites, articles, analysts and anyone else you follow.
First of all, the financial anchor people on CNBC are for the most part, not going to be helpful for you to make more money in stocks. CNBC has encouraged their anchors to go ahead and give their opinions for the sake of ratings. Steve Liesman, the economist-reporter is worth listening to, especially good during the October-November crisis. David Faber is interesting when it comes to reporting buy-outs, mergers and a few other stories like that. But the tendency is for reporters to be overly dramatic, panicky when the market is going down and elated and relieved when the markets are going up.
That is not what you need make money. You need to protect your state of mind to be uncluttered, calm and analytical. Be ready to act when the technical signals and common sense tell you to act with a lesser regard toward fundamental analysis.
As far as Jim Cramer, he is a really smart guy with a great research staff but the ideas on Mad Money show where he pushes buttons and makes sounds are difficult to develop a useful strategy that you can work with day to day. I realize the noises may be good for entertainment but you really shouldn’t be trying to get a stock idea without having a cohesive strategy that works day in and day out. Cramer is most useful in his personal interviews on his website, thestreet.com, about a subject you may be researching. He is more thoughtful and calm.
CNBC’s Fast Money show can be good but you can get information overload with 4-5 different people’s strategy and opinions. Remember that you only have to make money with 1-2 ideas at a time to make large amounts of money. You are not trying to be a mutual fund manager, hedge fund trader, or some super trader in your mind. Your job is to be consistently profitable with 1 or 2 stock ideas a day—and they can be the same stocks you are working with for several days. I find that I trade better when the television is totally turned off unless it is panic city like we saw in October and November where new events kept snowballing from day to day.
It is a similar analogy to reading magazines vs. reading a book. Magazine articles are short and although some information is useful, it isn’t usually complete. You can’t learn how to fly an airplane by reading a few magazine articles but if you make a study at a subject by approaching it as process of learning thoroughly. And that isn’t going to be done by taking a few tidbits here and there from one anchor’s comments to an analysts (mostly worthless to us), to the next talking head. By the way, analysts are paid salaried people who went and got their MBA somewhere. They are not paid to be right about stocks. We are paid to by the markets by having a sound process that works, good stock ideas and good execution (your personal performance).
Most people hear an idea on CNBC and go out and buy it without looking at it on a chart or applying some common sense to it. And my last disrespectful comment is that most people are wrong at about the worst time when it comes to most anything related to markets whether it is real estate, stocks, foreign exchange trading, tulip bulb farming, whatever it is. Why is there an all-time high of $7.89 trillion dollars in the US in money markets and banks? It should be the opposite where most of it is in the stock markets on November 21, 2008 but people react with their emotions, not their brains.
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