How
the Media Influences Your Investment Decisions for
Better or Worse by Joshua M. Brown and Jeff Macke (McGraw-Hill, 2014) is a book
by financial pundits about financial pundits.
It alternates between reflections on the financial media (I assume written by
Josh Brown) and interviews conducted by Jeff Macke. The interviewees are Jim
Rogers, Ben Stein, Karen Finerman, Henry Blodget, Herb Greenberg, James
Altucher, Barry Ritholtz, and Jim Cramer.
Since
both authors are members of the financial media (Brown is author of The Reform
Broker blog and a regular contributor to CNBC, Macke is the host of Breakout on
Yahoo Finance), the reader can’t expect to be told: “just turn off the news.”
Instead, the authors try to explain which pundits may be worth listening to and
which ones are just noise, or worse.
For
investors who are not intrinsically skeptical and who have no idea of how to
separate the wheat from the chaff, the authors offer a few good pointers. For
the rest of us—hardened, cynical folk that we are, the interviews offer some
good tidbits.
The
book has a strange subtext, along the lines of
“I once was lost but now I’m found.” Jeff Macke recounts his career-killing
“Car People” episode on the now defunct evening program CNBC Reports and his
subsequent emotional descent and recovery. And he interviews three insiders who
to a greater or lesser degree faced their own professional crises: Henry
Blodget, banned from the securities industry but now the editor and CEO of
Business Insider; Jim Cramer, who took a drubbing on Jon Stewart’s The Daily
Show; and James Altucher, who seems to specialize in failing and bouncing
back—and writing about it.
Whom
do I personally consider worth listening to? First, those who readily admit
they don’t know the answer. Bob Shiller comes to mind here. Second, those who
move markets, such as David Tepper. And third, those who are both bright and entertaining, with Warren Buffett being
perhaps the prime example. I assiduously avoid Cassandras, dim bulbs, and
pompous pretenders—and does that ever save me a lot of time!
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