That’s smart. The more I’ve done this over the years, the more I find everyone is selling something. Free “information”, means it’s propaganda, why else would they give it to you for free? It represents the views of whoever is funding it (not you).
Bloomberg terminals for example are fantastic (and crazy expensive). Bloomberg.com articles are free and seem quite fact-based, until you really dig into every number and find they are full of statistical manipulation (loads of nationalism), very slick though. The free analytics from “Factset” are bottom of the barrel, math-nonsense, always selling something.
LOL, but these guys are just flat out crazy. Anyone read the comments section? These people can’t even be comprehended…very very strange.
Used to read ZH and trade off it when i first joined the industry. Turned me into a permabear, a poor perma. ill still glance it over here and there but they tend to overstate the negatives.
Agree with what others have said on here. A lot of what ZH posts is crap and “Tin foil hattish” for sure. That said, there are some really good market articles that are taken directly from sell-side notes and other prominent sources. I fell out of using it years ago, but have more recently started looking at it again. If anything it does offer a good contrarion view.
Thanks for the input everyone. Thats what I was thinking. My default go to when it comes to what is going on in the world is The Economist. It is _pragmatic heaven (_plus, the random placement of dry humor is great). However, its strength also its weakness… it tends to assume everyone will behave with pragmatism. They did not think Dilma Rousseff would be impeached and they did not think Trump would make it past the primaries. It is probably a good idea to keep one eye on ZH.
ZH came into prominence during the 08 meltdown when it did seem indeed that the world was coming to an end. That time spawned a lot of gloom and doom sites–another prominent one at the time was The Market Ticker which had a fake ticker tape running across the top of the site showing prices eg AAPL…$8.00…GS…$2.50…etc The guy who ran that made his identity known unlike the founders of ZH at the time.
The addition of ad space slowed the site down and in other ways corrupted what had potential to be a good product. Interestingly, the site was blocked from access on most of the terminals at major banks like GS and MS. The majority of the reader comments are beyond bearish–more survivalist, gun nuts, and of course, gold bugs.
Yea, that’s how this whole thing started. I met one of these guys at work. I was doing a private dance for this guy and it came up that I was into trading (guys always wanna be creepy during these things and ask me “oooh, what are you into” and then I play dumb and tell them stuff I’m “into” … like running or trading). Anyway, apparently this guy follows markets and whatever so the conversation moved from commodities to global perspective (yea… still dancing for this guy. $20 bucks every 4min). I reach over and grab my Economist to prove I’m not making this up (yea, I actually do carry it around with me at work. I read it when I get bored). He’s like" Meh! I hate the economist… You gotta read the alternative news." I was like… “what, like Zerohedge?” He was cool with ZH but started spewing out these other sources like dollarcollapse.com and some pay only site of this guy who has a model of prediction so accurate that they threw him in jail (??)… (here is you tin foil hat, sir). He also went on to tell me that hoarding gold wasn’t enough. He was hoarding wedding rings so when the melt down comes folks won’t suspect he is prepared and that he is just hocking a wedding ring out of despiration. By this point, he had rung up quite a tab so I got dressed and we went our separate ways. Just another Sunday night for KMD.
The best value of ZH is when they include excerpts of credible research. I effectively use it solely to get a peak of research I don’t have access to. Whatever the author actually comments when it comes to market opinion (which is usually a fiesta of self-confirmatory statements with a hearty dose of hyperlinks), I barely pay attention to.
Being zealously bearish was all the craze after the crisis but those that have built a reputation on that worldview and stuck to it, indeed go down rightfully as conspiracy nuts today. Some other famous bears have worked hard to get rid of the perma label (Rosenberg, Roubini…) but now they just sound like anybody else. Point is, the industry’s most respected thinkers don’t have a fucking clue what’s going to happen next but you have a zerohedge that’s always there to cherry pick the micro development du jour, inflate it, and tell you "Yup, see this? We told you here, here and here".
Can we get some money together and stage a hostile takeover of ZH?
The golden age of financial-satire commentary is here! These coke-head derivative traders have totally squandered their shot. Man these guys could troll the finance sector like Breitbart trolls the libs. So much wasted potential.
Let’s put it this way, The Economist was super bullish about the securitisation market as late as summer '07.
Zero Hedge has been bearish about equities since like 2010.
Also, what I find annoying is how both are ideological.
The Economist sometimes seems to me like a collection of neo-liberal platitudes, while Zero Hedge is some kind of nationalistic/gold bug/contrarian thing.
I think the truth in most things is somewhere in the middle of these 2 media.
Not that it’s wrong to agree with the negatives. Only thing that matters is that the rest of the market doesn’t, which isn’t proof that the negative views are bad, they may just not have played out yet.
Kmd. Objective news is so 2016. The new meme is to assume that all the news groups are hopelessly biased and to accept that and to get news from multiple blatantly biased sources and then aggregate their opinions and then call them all stupid and say you’re better at critical thinking for it.
