Observations about CNBC and Me

Subscribing to my site guarantees you don't miss any new content. Choose either E-Mail Feed or RSS Feed. Thanks for visiting!

I generally tune out CNBC and watch less and less of it these days; I see it more as a time drain than anything. Some of the commentators are entertaining, for sure, but I very rarely glean any information I can use.

More and more, news outlets like CNBC, seem to be geared for individual traders and deals with the short term movements of the various markets.

Just look at some of the more popular shows on CNBC that have popped up in the last year or so. You’ve got Mad Money with Jim Cramer, there’s also Fast Money, hosted by Dylan Ratigan, talking stocks with a group of ‘bigtime’ traders. I guess these shows are somewhat educational but, in my opinion, probably do more harm then good, for those that act on the information.

Always entertaining

I haven’t decided whether the interest in these type of programs is a sign of renewed interest in the stock market, after all the real estate boom (bubble) years, or just an anecdotal sign of the short-term frothiness of our equity markets.

Either way, I’m not overly concerned about what it means for the short term, as I believe the long term global prospects are bright.

It just makes me shake my head, to see the legions of regular people that feel like they are going to go out there and outperform the professionals, with the skills they may have learned in a 6 week workshop, a series of infomercials or from listening to a pumped up commentator on CNBC.

Once in a while, which coincidentally happened about two weeks ago, a client comes to me and says something like, “I just heard to buy XYZ on CNBC, lets look into it…” I know its time to schedule a financial planning reinforcement meeting.

More baseball analogies

To keep with the baseball analogies: If Randy Johnson is on the mound, who has a better chance of hitting him (over the long-term) you? or Alex Rodriguez? Now, I’m not Scrooge here, keeping my clients away from owning individual stocks… Ba Humbug!

In fact, many of my clients have individual company stocks or bonds, but generally speaking, these positions make up a small percentage of the overall asset allocations.

It would be bad for the psychological balance of the relationship to deny a client from buying a stock they may really want, but how much they buy is a different story.

After watching CNBC this morning for about 45 minutes here’s some of what I observed:

• various ‘experts’ have varying opinions on the outlook for stocks, bonds, oil, natural gas, interest rates etc.
• market commentators speak more and more about ‘global’ markets
• almost every opinion was geared towards short term market moves and short term economic trends
• there is alot of talk about which individual stocks are moving in either direction
• there is alot of talk about the ‘health of the consumer’
• the CNBC hosts want strong opinions from their guests, otherwise chastise them for being ‘too blah’
• CNBC loves going to the split screen, with multiple market commentators talking over one another

Also, some of the commercials were pretty funny…

Tags: CNBC and Me