Information Unplugging and Reconnecting
July 3, 2017
Summer is finally upon us and the break of our normal routines will begin as vacations set in. You might be surprised that even for investment professionals getting a few days away from the constant bombardment of news and data can be refreshing. Even in today’s world of having a sense of always being plugged in, I find that breaking away from your normal routine of gathering news and data is helpful in clearing your mind. We all need a break from time to time if just to maintain our edge. I think it’s important for everyone to be informed about issues that affect their money.
Those that talk to me regularly have heard me say time and time again, “remember it’s your money”. Each one of us has a regiment of how we gather the information needed to gain insight into the market and the economic outlook. No two people I know go about their decision-making the same way. Some people like to read the opinion of others while some like to dive into the raw data and do their own analysis. Whatever your method, the key is simply have a process, even if it’s just picking up the phone and calling your trusted advisor and asking the question, “what do you think we should do?”
As vacations are starting I thought I would share with you how I get back into the daily, erratic news flow. After being gone from the daily flow I wonder what did I miss? What was important and what was noise? To start, I have to say I am an old school newspaper reader. I started my first Wall Street Journal subscription in 1976 and over the course of time I added the NY Times, The Financial Times, Investor’s Business Daily and Barron’s. This was all pre-internet and email, but the habit of actually turning pages of a newspaper is a habit that is hard to break. I currently have consolidated my papers to just the Journal and the NY Times so when I’m out of town in unplugged mode I don’t do what is economical and what a trusted financial advisor might suggest, and stop the delivery of the papers. Instead, when I get back home I have a stack of old papers awaiting my review.
I know many people that would look at the almost two foot high stack and think just throw them away, but not me. I carefully, in chronological order, go through each missed day of news looking not so much for the day-to-day flow of the market but for the single major story for that day. I then rip out that one story from each day’s paper. I then read each day’s major story in order to get the big picture of what happened while I was away. This process has proven to be the best way for me to remove a lot of the market noise that we become numbed by when we are in the market on a daily, hourly, or minute-by-minute basis. I know my method isn’t for everyone but this approach has worked for me for years. I hope you all can enjoy some time unplugged this summer.
Carl Gambrell
