Journalists are stupid - The Stock Market

The stock market is trouble, whether it goes up or down.




The MSM is always downbeat and worried about the stock market. If the market is looking good, growing, then they are saying "the stock market can’t sustain this kind of growth" If the markethas a down day they tell us, "we’re just one drop away from another crash".

It's either stupidity on the part of the journalist, or plain old fear mongering. Bad news gets better rating thatn good news.


It doesn’t seem to matter which direction the stock market is moving, because both will be made to sound bad by the media.

Take the reporting around the anniversary of Black Monday.

Around the 20th anniversary of the Black Monday stock market crash, a nosedive that cost investors 22.6 percent in one day, reporters were warning it could happen again.

There was no reason to think it would happen again, at least not to anyone who knew anything about why Black Monday happened =, or knew anything about the market, bvut woe is us anyway.

After explaining some reasons why a crash was unlikely, Barron’s Andrew Bary wrote, Despite all this, a decline of 1987 proportions, while unlikely isn’t impossible. Bary then made the case for a huge stock decline, even saying the optimists’ case has some big flaws.

CBS’s Alexis Christoforous worried that such a crash could happen again based on comparisons between 1987 and 2007.

[Black Monday] was made worse by computer program trading, but the things that triggered it were overvalued stocks, a weak dollar, a period of extreme market volatility and a summer of worrying economic news. Sound familiar? Some market strategists are warning investors now to strap in, said Christoforous on October 14.

Susan McGinnis complained on Early Show about a 100 point-drop in the Dow on October 15, but without mentioning the record high for the Dow on October 11 and record close of 14,164 on October 9. Meredith Vieira on NBC and Chris Cuomo on ABC both worried about a crash in September as the market saw ups and downs.





Ironically, the same downbeat view about the stock market surfaced as the market was climbing to record highs.

Even as investors are making money in the market, Anthony Mason reports there are concerns tonight about the rest of the U.S. economy, complained CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric on the day the Dow closed above 13,000 for the very first time.

Truth: According to the October 15 Wall Street Journal, a stock market crash is unlikely and investors see stocks continuing their rebound.

Phil Roth (quoted by The Wall Street Journal on October 15). Roth is a chief technical market analyst at the brokerage firm Miller Tabak.

That Wall Street Journal article by E. S. Browning also disagreed with the Evening News assertion that stocks are overvalued.

Stocks don’t look as overpriced today as they did in 1987. Today, the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index trade only a little above the historical average of 16 times profits for the past 12 months. In 1987, the S&P 500 was at more than 20 times profits.

In contrast to many other reports, CNN’s Ali Velshi was optimistic about the stock market because of the facts on American Morning December 10.
It was a strong week for all of the major indices. The Dow was up 1.9 percent, the NASDAQ 1.7 percent, and the S&P, which probably resembles more of your 401(k)s, up 1.6 percent. How is it looking for the year? Well, just a couple of weeks ago, we thought your earnings, your winnings for the year had been wiped out. But they haven't. Look at that. The Dow is up almost 9.3 percent, the NASDAQ better than that [12.04%]. And the S&P, a little weaker, but still up about 6 percent, said the senior business correspondent.



Bottom line. If you are getting your news from a journalist, you getting your news from the wrong place.