Reader question: Please explain this sentence: News is just white noise when investing. My comments: This means the investor has to block out daily news like white noise so that they can remain focused – on what they’re trying to accomplish long-term. I think this means, for example, that if you’ve bought some shares of a particular company, perhaps you’d do better by not following news about that company too closely. Or you won’t know what to do. I mean, the share price fluctuates, going up this minute and down that hour, nonstop, you cannot possibly be buying in or selling out at every turn. White noise, you see, is technically speaking the noise you sometimes hear while moving one radio station to another or the noise you hear after a television station closes for the night. Zzzzzzzzz, in other words. Again, technically speaking, white noise is a collection of sounds at different frequencies coming at us all together at once. It’s like after class, 300 pupils rush out of the classrooms all chattering and laughing and making all sorts of sounds and noises. They’re all speaking or shouting but because their voices come at us all together at once, all we can hear is white noise, or pure noise, nothing meaningful, nothing distinguishable. Where news is concerned, white noise may refer to, metaphorically speaking, many various things we see in the media. In our example, all analysis and speculation on the stock market, for instance, belong in this category, especially wild rumors. |