Basic Action to Becoming a Better Investor

It is frequently said that step one to becoming the best investor is a simple one — switch off the Television.

Top financial channel — along with its competitors — will simply make you dumber and poorer.

This arrives as a shock to many. In fact, financial channels offer a steady stream of well-credentialed professionals, men and women with extraordinary titles from prestigious firms. Most hold PhDs, years of experience, or manage huge sums of funds. They appear good. They sound sharp. They have insightful ideas plus reams of arcane investment data tripping off their tongues.

How might following to them possibly make you a poorer trader?

Since the unstated premise behind these programs — that exist, obviously, on the way to sell advertising — is that investors need to be in a near-constant position of response:

“The market is making a new high today. What must investors perform now?”

“The Fed has left rates of interest unchanged. What must investors do now?

“GNP was up an unexpectedly strong 3.8 percent last quarter. What should investors perform at present?”

They make on an analyst with a bullish view as well as another with a bearish one — on stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, interest rates, or the economy — let them square off for a few minutes, after that cut to commercials. After sometime later, they come back and perform it some more. This goes on day after day, week after week, every year.

Why do numerous bright, talented, educated people spend countless hours staring blankly in the tube?

The brief reply, of course, is we like it.

But do we, actually? Is watching TV more fulfilling than what you’d be doing if you were not?

If you get particular about it, you might think slightly ridiculous. For instance, perhaps you have told yourself something like:

• Gee, I really need to have further exercise, but Dancing With the Stars is on in 10 minutes.
• I promised my daughter I’d train her how to play chess, but these Seinfeld re-runs are very funny.
• It is long past time I ended in to go to my getting old grandmother, but I can not miss the playoffs!
• I promised for myself I would figure out how to play the piano this year, but in the week will be the finals of American Idol.
• I actually do want to plant that garden. But I am unable to miss my soaps.

If we’re challenged, certainly, we have lots of rationalizations.

Let a TV critic tell you that most of the programming is senseless junk and you will point to the learning things on The History Channel, Discovery, or National Geographic, even though that’s only a fraction of what you watch.

If he replies that you’re still being subjected to several hours of commercials each week, you inform him you tape the programs and fast-forward through them.

If he counters that taping only allows you to use more TV, you could for all time play your trump card: “Mind your business.”

After all, you are an adult. It is your life to survive. It is possible to spend it any style you desire.

But, between South Park and Grey’s Anatomy, would you ever reflect on the way you’re spending it?

Regardless how good the programming is — and let’s face it, a number of it is great — or how rapidly you fast-forward with the commercials, the hours you use before the tube is time you have not used up pursuing your aims, living out your dreams, or simply interacting with another human being. If you are aged and companionless — or housebound for some other cause — that’s different. But that doesn’t describe the majority of us.

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Postman warned of our consuming love affair with television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. From the book — a jeremiad about the danger of turning serious conversations about politics, business, religion, and science into entertainment packages — he argues that TV is creating not the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 but rather of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Spiritual devastation is more likely to arrive from an enemy using a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother doesn’t watch us, by his option. We watch him, by ours. There isn’t any require for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. Whenever a population gets distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined like a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public discussion becomes a form of baby-talk, when, briefly, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.”

He concludes that we’d all be improved off if TV got worse, not better.

According to A.C. Nielsen, 99 percent of American households use a TV set. Two-thirds own more than three. These sets are on an more or less of 6 hours and 47 minutes per day.

Forty-nine percentage of Americans polled say they spend a lot of time in front of the TV. It’s not hard to determine why. The average viewer watches over four hours of TV daily. That is two months of non-stop TV-watching per year. In a 65-year life, a person may have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

You already understand how little you’ll gain by watching so much TV. But have you also considered what it can be costing you?

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