Avoid advice from personal finance coverage

Susan Antilla, a columnist for Bloomberg View, writes that consumers should ignore any advice on investing from personal finance publications.

Antilla writes, “There is a good chance that you will lose money if you follow the 2013 top stock recommendations. And the grander the promise of profits, the more you should worry about getting burned.

“Personal-finance news became a growing subgenre of business journalism in the 1970s, after companies started dropping defined-benefit retirement plans and the public ‘was thrown into this system and forced to make their way,’ says Dean Starkman, who runs a business-journalism blog at Columbia Journalism School. The resulting coverage to help the public manage its own money ‘perpetuates the idea that individuals can beat the market,’ he says, ‘and that’s just not true.’

“An army of commentators, many with abysmal track records, helps spread the useless predictions. You will see them quoted, photographed for magazine cover stories and trotted out for appearances at investor conferences.

“‘The entire conversation is corrupt,’ says Starkman, who sees much of personal-finance writing as marketing material for the investment industry.”

Read more here.