You don't think the front page of the WSJ would contain a decent summary of the day's business news?
If you want long term trend data, it’s easy to get good data for free. It’ll be boring and most trends will be positive (thank our lucky stars we live in the technological era). Unless you have a real passion, you’ll most likely not visit one of these sources twice (World Bank, IMF, FRED in the USA, tradingeconomics.com, the SEC)
If you want short term, real-time data, you’ll likely have to pay for it. The downside is that there’s a deluge of data and almost all of it is useless (unless you care about up-to-the-minute prices for beans in China or whatever).
The job of journalists is to mine all this info for something sensational or, failing that, spin some short term data bump into a big story.
Way back in the 1940’s, there was so little data out there that the WSJ could simply print all the current market events and call it a newspaper. There was so little entertainment out there, that people bought and read that paper!
Information dissemination remains an unsolved problem.
edit: I will say that's a profit opportunity both for those who can spread fake meme news and for those who can bother to see through it, but for the vast middle it is idocracy.
- The Drugs Young Bankers Use to Get Through the Day—and Night
- CEOs Want Trump to Change Course on Tariffs. He Isn’t Budging.
- Untangling America’s Love-Hate Relationship With Corporate Power
Etc, it doesn't really tell you much anything about what's going on in the market. Yahoo Finance on the other hand is a great overview, the upcoming fed meeting is front and center, there's a market overview on the right, highlights of specific big movers, etc.
Not anymore?
Take front page today, first "Opinion" title: "The Trans Double-Mastectomy Lawsuit" (not sure what their stance is here: they went full woke but they're toning wokism down now that Trump won). First big headline: "The drugs young bankers use to get through the day". "America's love/hate relationship with corporate power".
"How an Ivy League Police Commissioner Hunted an Ivy League Murder Suspect"
Facepalm. I mean, sure, if I was reading The Guardian in the UK or something.
But how the fuck has anything of that to do with business and/or finance?
That's what I see first, front page.
Funnily enough the first title related to business or finance is one HN won't like: "These 5 Wall Street Titans Thought Bitcoin Was a Fad. Here’s What They Say Now".
People are making fun of the WJS, calling it the "Woke Street Journal". They've been more interested in pushing the ESG ideology (the one were banks in the US [and the EU] are secretly assigning scores to every US individuals depending on how "ESG friendly" they are), including solar (not that there's everything wrong with solar) and most of all running an anti-Trump / anti-Musk campaign, being sure Harris would won, then running actual news about Wall Street and businesses.
They just lost the plot.
I think they will still trade with too much leverage and poor asset allocation, though.
It’s not just timing the bubble that is tricky. Sometimes the “obvious” bubble never ends up popping.
In my understanding day trading is mostly about looking for pretty patterns in lines and ascribing meaning to them, as well as attempting to trade on public information that HFTs and 3,000 well-paid and professional traders at GS have already priced in
That said, COVID would have been a better example for airline and hotel stocks.
[Also IMO, PUT options are safer than shorts. Do your own research.]
There's an SF book called Replay that imagines a guy reliving his life from his fifties or so to his teens or so. One of the clever plot points (not really a spoiler) is that he just happens to remember a highly improbable sports result around the time of his replay which, with the help of some friends and family loans, makes him very wealthy. The book would have been a lot less interesting if the main characterer was just starting out as a poor college student over and over again.
Sure, I could have made money in dot-com/bomb (and maybe bitcoin) but I still would have needed a fair bit of capital to have made life-altering gains.
To the point of the article, predicting how most specific company or economic outcomes will affect stock prices is pretty much a sucker bet. Perhaps excluding some specific events like 9/11--but even that effect wasn't that great.
Even the poorest American could probably have scraped enough together to own that much bitcoin back then. If they held onto it until now, they would be a billionaire!
The more interesting experiment to me would be if you gave me a week's worth (say) of the WSJ from ten years hence, what could I do with it?
I was arguing that with the right information, you could turn a few bucks into a massive fortune (bitcoin being a single example).
Everyone knows it can happen. That is why get-rich-quick schemes work.