Do You Think Like The Rest Of The Market?

This past week, I conducted an experiment on Seeking Alpha.  I wrote a facetious post on FATrader.com and then published it as a blog post on Seeking Alpha.  The crux of the post provided “reasons” for why the Mueller report caused the decline in the futures last Sunday night into the Monday open.  In a nutshell, the article provided “analysis” as to how the politics surrounding the report is what caused the market to decline, despite the “positive” nature of the report.

The initial responses to that article were quite typical of most market participants.  You see, most of the initial commenters took the article at face value, and provided no thought of their own into determining whether the article made any sense.   In fact, most initial commenters went right into their own perspective as to whether the result of the investigation was proper or not, and then took issue with how they thought I personally viewed it.

[The reason I had to note “initial commenters” was because eventually those who know my perspectives and writing style recognized and posted that it was a facetious article, so very few after those posts took issue with the article in the same way as the “initial commenters.”]

In other words, not a single one of the initial commenters took issue with my ridiculous attempt at trying to align the political news with the market directional move.  They simply accepted it and viewed it as “reasonable analysis.”  And, believe me, the alignment proposition of the article was truly ridiculous, as many of you may have recognized when I initially posted it on FATrader.com.  

This has proven to me, yet again, that there are very few people who actually think about what they read.  Rather, most people simply accept the superficial perspective of any article they read, especially if it aligns with their views.  This was evident by the fact that very few initial commenters actually took issue with the lack of intellectual honesty in my “analysis.”  And, not a single one of the initial commenters called me out for the “crap” analysis which it was. 

The funny part of it all is that a number of these same commenters post all the time that my Elliott Wave analysis is akin to voodoo.  But, I digress.

Moreover, the ones that got upset about the article did so for political reasons.  And, some got so upset about the politics to which I alluded in the article that they said they were going to “unfollow” me. 

"To thine own self be true," says Polonius in Hamlet. And, I believe this is excellent advice to be taken for analysis as well.  You must view everything you read through a prism of intellectual honesty so that you can ferret out the truth.  That means you MUST become a very critical reader. 

Unfortunately, most of what people put out there as “analysis” is retro-fitting some perspective into the market action.  Whether that means they are attempting to explain how the news fit into the market action or how a financial report fit into market action, most of what you read is simply “crap” analysis.  Most of what you read is akin to an analyst trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  And, you have to become a more discerning reader to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here at FATrader.com, we are blessed to have the highest quality of analysts, and they do all the work for you in being able to separate out the wheat from the chaff.

But, the next time another analyst presents you with analysis based upon a “correlation,” or a commonly accepted market proposition (ex. gold is a safe haven, or you can’t fight the Fed), or about how some geopolitical event moved the market in a certain way when last month it moved it in an opposite way, please take a moment to test the “analysis” through the prism of truth, market history, and a dose of intellectual honesty.  You will be shocked at how much more of a discerning reader you will become, and likely a better investor.