Salmon: Daily stock market stories should be banned

Felix Salmon writes on Fusion that daily stock market stories should be stopped because they don’t help investors.

Salmon writes, “At the other end of the spectrum, big moves over the course of months or years can also be informative. What has happened in the past few years to Tesla stock, or Netflix? Looking at those stories in the form of stock charts can be useful, just as the bigger story about how stocks have performed since the financial crisis is also an interesting one.

“By far the least informative form of stock-market reporting – the one which should never be done – is not the minute-to-minute stuff, or the long-term stuff, but rather the day-over-day stuff.

“What did the Dow do today? It’s random, it doesn’t matter. If any newscast tells you what the Dow did today, they’re implicitly telling you that the Dow’s movement today is important. Which, it isn’t. If they tell you what the Dow did today every day, then they’re implicitly telling you that daily movements in the Dow are really important, important enough to get reported day in and day out. Which is insane. No one believes that.

“So while stock-market reporting is being banned outright in China, let’s not go that far in the USA. Let’s just ban daily stock-market reporting. That would be a pretty good start.”

Read more here.