Financial media creates the illusion that investing success comes from having the latest information. Turn on any business channel and you’ll see urgent market updates, breaking news alerts, and expert opinions delivered with the authority of fact.
This constant stream of information feels valuable. It isn’t.
The Information Overload Problem
Financial media operates on a simple business model: capture attention. This creates several problems for investors:
Noise masquerades as signal. Markets move constantly, and media needs to explain every fluctuation. The result is an endless stream of explanations for random price movements that have no predictive value.
Conflicting advice is presented as expertise. Within the same day, you’ll hear bullish and bearish cases for the same stock from equally credentialed experts. Both can’t be right, but media presents both as valid analysis.
Short-term thinking becomes normalized. Media focuses on daily price moves, quarterly earnings beats, and weekly trends because these generate immediate engagement. Long-term wealth building doesn’t make compelling television.
The Confidence Trap
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of financial media is how it builds false confidence. Regular consumption makes investors feel informed and prepared to make decisions. This perceived knowledge often leads to overconfidence and excessive trading.
Studies consistently show that investors who trade more frequently perform worse than those who trade less. Yet financial media encourages the very behavior that destroys returns.
What Actually Matters
The market already prices in publicly available information instantly. By the time you hear news on television or read it in articles, thousands of professional traders have already acted on it.
What matters for long-term investment success isn’t access to information—it’s having a systematic framework for processing information that’s already reflected in prices.
Price momentum, for example, doesn’t require you to interpret news or predict future events. It simply measures what’s actually happening in the market right now.
A Better Approach
Instead of consuming hours of financial media daily, successful investors focus on systematic processes that remove emotion and speculation from their decisions.
This doesn’t mean ignoring all market information. It means filtering information through objective criteria rather than subjective interpretation.
The Brockmann Method exemplifies this approach by ranking stocks based on measurable momentum indicators rather than news flow or analyst opinions. The system doesn’t care what CNBC says about Apple—it cares what Apple’s stock price is actually doing.
Tomorrow, we’ll examine how emotions compound the problems created by both stock picking and media consumption.