Why Does the Financial Media Bombard Us With Useless Information?
Hint: It's their job.
If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through yet another breathless market update, watching another panel of experts contradict each other in real time, or closing your phone more confused than when you opened it, you’ve already sensed the answer.
The financial media doesn’t bombard you with information because it’s trying to help you.
It bombards you because your attention is the product.
The machine runs on urgency, not wisdom.
Economist Herbert A. Simon wrote something more than fifty years ago that I keep coming back to. He said: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
He wrote that before smartphones existed, before social media, before 24-hour financial television, algorithmic news feeds, and AI-generated market commentary arrived by the minute. Somehow, he still managed to describe our current moment with perfect precision all the way back in 1971.
Today’s investor has access to more information than any generation before them; real-time alerts, competing economic forecasts, podcasts for the commute, YouTube personalities breaking down the Fed, influencers calling the next crash - or the next rally - with equal confidence.
And yet, despite all of it, most investors feel more anxious and less certain than ever.
That is not a coincidence. That is the intended result.
Television networks cannot monetize dead air. Financial websites cannot monetize patience. Social media platforms cannot monetize “nothing significant happened today.” Brokerage firms cannot monetize inactivity.
That’s why I don’t post every day, there’s nothing really post-worthy every day.
Every corner of the financial media ecosystem is built around one objective: keeping your attention engaged right now. Not helping you build wealth over the next twenty years, right now, today, this minute. Those are two very different objectives.
Confusing one for the other is one of the most expensive mistakes an investor can make.
Why so much of it feels useless — because it is.
The information isn’t useless by accident. It’s useless by design.
Urgency captures attention. Fear captures attention. Conflict between opposing experts captures attention. A bold prediction that markets will crash - or soar - by year end captures attention. Measured, calm analysis of long-term fundamentals does not capture attention, at least not in the way these platforms require.
So the machine optimizes for the former, always. Every headline is written to make you feel like you’re behind, missing something, or about to be blindsided. Every notification is engineered for urgency. Every segment is designed so that by the time it ends, you feel compelled to stay tuned for the next one.
None of that is designed to make you a better investor. It is designed to keep you watching.
I want to be fair: many people in financial media are intelligent and hardworking. This isn’t about individual dishonesty. It’s about incentive structures. And after more than forty years in this business, I can tell you that incentives quietly shape behavior more powerfully than most people realize - including the behavior of the people delivering the information.
What experience actually looks like.
I entered this business in a completely different era. Information moved slower. There was time to think before acting, to reflect before deciding, to sit with uncertainty rather than immediately reach for a reaction to it. Not by design but by necessity.
I’ve lived through the crash of 1987, the savings and loan crisis, the dot-com collapse, the financial crisis, the COVID panic, and multiple cycles of inflation, rate shock, and speculative euphoria. Each one arrived with its own vocabulary of urgency. Each one came with a chorus of voices explaining why this moment was uniquely dangerous - or uniquely promising - and why immediate action was required.
Each time, the investors who fared best were not the ones who reacted fastest to the loudest voices, they were the ones who thought clearly while others were reacting emotionally.
That is not a small distinction. Over time, it is the whole ballgame.
What they can’t sell you.
Here is what no financial media platform can monetize: silence. Patience. The discipline to hold a well-constructed position while the noise reaches a fever pitch around you. The judgment to recognize that most of what’s being presented as urgent is, in the context of your actual financial life, completely irrelevant.
These things don’t generate clicks. They don’t produce advertising revenue. They don’t drive trading activity. And so they go largely unrepresented in the information environment you’re swimming in every day.
But they are, in my experience, exactly what separates investors who build lasting wealth from those who spend decades chasing their own reactions.
Thoughtful investing looks boring from the outside. Patience looks like inaction. Diversification looks unsophisticated. Not responding to a frightening headline can look like complacency, until a real crisis arrives, and suddenly all the boring things look very wise.
What I’d ask you to do instead.
Ignore most of it.
Not carelessly, not by becoming indifferent to risk or blind to changing conditions. But with intention. Recognize that the overwhelming majority of what arrives in your feed today is optimized for your attention, not your financial wellbeing. Those are different things.
The questions that actually matter for your financial life are quieter ones: What are you trying to accomplish? What level of risk lets you sleep at night? What does your life need to look like in ten or twenty years? What mistakes are most important to avoid?
Those conversations rarely happen on television. They happen one on one, without urgency, without a countdown clock, without a chyron screaming about the market’s next move.
That is what I try to offer here. Not more noise, less noise. Not faster reactions, better perspective. Not the illusion of certainty that media platforms traffic in, but the kind of honest, grounded guidance that holds up across full market cycles.
Stay the course. Think clearly. The next time you find yourself buried in financial information that leaves you more confused than when you started, remember that was the point all along.