Let’s start this week’s links with Felix Salmon’s post about an unusual thing (at least to me) that happened this week – a Twitter fight – between a fund manager and a CNBC host.
Here is an excerpt from Salmon’s post:
As a general rule, it’s not a good idea to take investment advice from people who appear on CNBC a lot. CNBC Is a marketing platform: fund managers love being on there because it increases their visibility and the chances that people will want to invest with them. Think of it as a dumbed-down, glossy version of Seeking Alpha. But do you really need to be invested with the kind of people who are trolling for customers by appearing on CNBC? I don’t think so.
I quite agree with this because what makes good TV or sells a lot newspapers, magazines, or page-views is often at odds with sound advice that is usually boring and dull.
To add to that, I haven’t come across anyone so far who can predict the market with any reasonable accuracy which most of these pundits try to do. Things like Twitter and blogs make it quite easy to do a fact check on what these pundits said a few months ago and how the market behaved, but even then not many people bother to do that.
Predictions by most people is just an extension of the current situation – when gold was rising, and stocks were falling – they said that it will continue to behave that way in the future also. Now, when stocks have started to rise – the same people are talking about buying into stocks and getting “cautiously optimistic”.
It’s your money and it’s up to you to do the fact checking and figure out who to listen to and who to ignore.
Moving on, the Psy Fi blog has a huge list of behavioral biases and it wasn’t really hard for me to think of one example of each of them that I have experienced myself while reading the post.
Ranjan writes about a decade of the life insurance industry in India.
While RBI expects Indian inflation to level in the months to come, China has already seen some relief from pork prices coming down.
NYT has this excellent graphic on the inter linkages between European debt.
Forbes comes up with a new list of richest Indians. (FE link)
Finally, Japan creates the world’s first flying spherical robot!
Enjoy your weekend!
Interesting post! It is interesting to hear contrasting views of experts on the economic issues, but they may not be commercial though enlightening. So can’t blame the media for not highlighting it. Goes back to the evergreen problem of choosing between creating public awareness to commercialization.