Reporting on the stock market is like giving a play-by-play report on a Mexican jumping bean. There's almost constant motion, but little of the movement has long-term consequences.
However, stock market reporting has increased the fluctuations into gyrations which make for trading opportunities that Wall Street professionals and on-line traders love. So financial coverage has been good for stock trading, brokerage houses, and those who need momentum up or down.
'Amid the endless noise, whom do you trust?' is the prescient question that Mr. Kurtz asks. Based on his descriptions of the financial journalists involved, their sources, and the checks and balances, the answer for many people will be 'no one' in the financial media.
'. . . a gust of rhetorical wind can buffet your stock like a sailboat in a hurricane.' If you are a long-term investor, this doesn't much matter. If you own index funds or their synthetic equivalents, it matters even less. Mr. Kurtz points out that mutual funds rarely beat the index funds, and that some professionals use them. On the other hand, you are unlikely to hear much about that circumstance on the television financial news reports.
Mr. Kurtz proposes reform, ' . . . it would be a significant improvement if more media outlets resisted the temptation to engage in hype and rumor-mongering in an attempt to stand out from the crowd.' On the other hand he warns that, 'Those who blindly follow them have no one to blame but themselves.'
Now you know the serious, but spare, message of this book. The rest is basically a series of detailed stories about financial media personalities like Jim Cramer, Maria Bartiromo (Money Honey), Mark Haines, Steve Lipin, David Faber, Ron Insana, Lou Dobbs, Alan Abelson, Gene Marcial, and Dan Dorfman. An occasional Wall Street analyst and strategist makes the book, as well.
I found these detailed stories to be fairly uninteresting, over-long, and filled with more trivia than substance. That's why I rated the book down one star. In particular, although I was glad that Jim Cramer was covered in the book, there is entirely too much Jim Cramer. Once you know that he has straddled too many worlds in the past (creating either conflicts of interest or the appearance of such conflicts), there is not too much more to be gained to reading about him.
I know some of the people covered in the book, and found the detail about them to be less than revealing. There is much more that could have been discussed than is contained here. The research for the book seems to have been superficial in many cases, and overly dependent on public stories rather than interviews. I was tempted to mark the book down another star, but did not. Most people new to the world of financial journalism would probably make similar errors.
After you read this book, ask yourself where else you get more information than is really needed for your purposes. Then consider how you could reduce that information flow to make it more relevant, dependable, trustworthy, and valuable. That's the ultimate challenge of the New Economy. Whom can you trust? How little time can you spend to get trustworthy information?
