Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

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In general, a reputable paper like the WSJ will hire people that are smart enough to predict stock trend and understand the macro factors

This is not true at all and I don't know where this is coming from. The signal to noise ratio in the mainstream media's personal finance pages is famously low. The WSJ is known for its reporting, not its investment advice. And had you bothered to look up the author on Wikipedia, you would have seen he doesn't work in equities, and apparently never has.

Sure, the author might turn out to be a genius who identified all the factors that will lead to the next big crash--if so, how come the genius reasoning is not evident in the article? Assertions like the second item--'the Fed is buying Treasuries, must mean they're nervous'--are presented in an unconvincing way. I assumed it was self-evident that these claims were unconvincing, but apparently it wasn't so.

So here's why that claim, among others, was uninformed: the Fed's stated policy is actually to not change the size of their portfolio of securities held outright. The treasury purchases are offsetting principal payments of other debt. The neutrality of this policy does not suggest 'nervousness' at all. http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/opolicy/operating_policy_1...

  I assumed it was self-evident that these claims were unconvincing [..]

Then there's no need to comment. Comments in places like these add value when they contain information above and beyond what is already contained in the article. If your assumption is correct, your comment simply states what everyone already knows. If the assumption is incorrect, your comment doesn't provide any argument to convince others that your claim is correct and the article is wrong. In either case, your comment doesn't add anything. There's no need to point out the blatantly obvious, unless to explain why it is blatantly obvious to someone for whom it isn't blatantly obvious.

What threatens the signal-to-noise ratio of HN is that more and more people start making unsubstantiated claims concerning articles. They may be right, but I, as someone with only casual knowledge of a given subject, will never know. People responding only to state their opinion, without supporting it with possibly convincing arguments. I don't feel those kinds of comments are worthwhile.

  And had you bothered to look up the author on Wikipedia

My point is that your argument was too broad and this individual author's credentials are inconsequential. Even if reporting in personal finance is awful in general, then after your comment, I still didn't know why this piece in particular is awful.

cynicalkane's biased; he programs for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Of course he wants to persuade the lemmings to invest so that he still has a job. Logical? yes. Immoral? probably.

It's nice that you think the HN readership is a bunch of lemmings off whom I intend to directly profit, but the CME is a futures exchange and has almost nothing to do with personal investing.

The motivation behind my post was to claim that the original article is not news and not valuable. On a website that calls itself "Hacker News", I think it's important to talk about stuff like this. Maybe pretentious, but not valueless.

I also don't like how the financial news seems to lead people to throw their money away to traders by investing randomly and panicking every time the stock market burps. Even though the writers are probably mostly well-meaning, the stuff they write isn't helpful.

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