Quote from kevinmclark:
I make it a point not to listen to the news until Iâm finished trading for the day. I only monitor when the economic reports are scheduled to be release. This helps me to focus on price and not what I think should happen.
I think that the above is extremely wise advice. I would even take it a few steps further...
Price doesn't care about GDP, what the fed will or won't do, or that some analyst has downgraded a stock. One cannot understand price movement by thinking of it in terms of the behavior of an individual or even a small group.
It is as Mandelbrot surmises in The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004):
"In a market there is... a spontaneous internal life... a special dynamic -- greater than, and different from, the sum of its parts...
...in substantial part, prices are determined by endogenous effects peculiar to the inner workings of the markets themselves."
Even Bachelier, the father of modern finance, in his Theory of Speculation (1926) noted:
"events often bear no apparent relation to price variation."
The media make the news fit the movement. If the Dow rises they look for positive news items to explain it, if it falls they look for negative items to excuse it. How can anyone prove otherwise? Especially when all their smart explanations are given after the fact.
The financial media are set up to herd people into corrals of opinion, to mislead them as to the true nature of price movement. That is their job!
In Chaos (pg. 29) Gleick notes that when âfaced with irregularityâ most people âlook for explanations outside the system.â
This is exactly what has happened with the stock market, but these explanations are now dogma rather than theory.
I know it probably sounds like I'm on a soapbox here... forgive me, it IS something I feel very strongly about...
Rgds,
E. Allon