**MYTH KILLER: Why We Ignore the Financial Press (Mostly)**

Okay so this one isn’t real­ly about debunk­ing a “myth” — it’s about debunk­ing the finan­cial press.

When we say “we ignore the finan­cial press,” I don’t mean we’re wan­der­ing around like invest­ing monks who’ve tak­en a vow of head­line celiba­cy. That’s not it. I read the Finan­cial Review every day. I’m just not read­ing it the way some oth­er investors do.

Here’s what you need to under­stand: the finan­cial press isn’t designed to make you mon­ey. It’s designed to make the PUBLISHER mon­ey.

They man­u­fac­ture sto­ries. Sto­ries keep you click­ing. Click­ing keeps the ad rev­enue flow­ing and keeps the lights on. That’s their busi­ness mod­el.

And sto­ries are easy to make. PR agen­cies feed jour­nal­ists pol­ished nar­ra­tives in board­room lan­guage. Entire arti­cles begin as pitch emails from peo­ple whose job is lit­er­al­ly “make my client look investable.” Noth­ing sin­is­ter. Just incen­tives doing what incen­tives do.

Which leads to the ques­tion I always want to ask finance jour­nal­ists: if you’re so good at this, why are you still work­ing?

Tony and I have been sur­prised over the years we’ve been doing the show when we’ve spo­ken to some of Aus­trali­a’s most respect­ed finance jour­nal­ists and asked them about their own invest­ing, only to find out they aren’t active investors. They talk about invest­ing for a liv­ing — they just don’t do much of it them­selves. It’s like the bar­ber who does­n’t cut his own hair.

And if they were any good at invest­ing, they prob­a­bly would­n’t still be work­ing their jobs and stress­ing over dead­lines. Like Tony, they would have retired young.

But that’s the thing — most finance jour­nal­ists aren’t try­ing to be investors. They’re sto­ry­tellers. Their job is to trans­form chaos into digestible nar­ra­tive before your morn­ing cof­fee. And they’re good at it. Sto­ries are seduc­tive. Humans need them. Mar­kets run on them.

Most short-term mar­ket move­ment is sto­ry-dri­ven. Fear sto­ries. Hype sto­ries. “This time it’s dif­fer­ent” sto­ries. “Val­ue invest­ing is dead” sto­ries. “AI is a bub­ble” sto­ries. “AI is NOT a bub­ble” sto­ries. The cycles are so pre­dictable you could set your watch by them.

But QAV isn’t a sto­ry­telling sys­tem. It’s a num­bers sys­tem. We don’t react to sto­ries. We react to data.

That does­n’t mean sto­ries are use­less. It means they’re not deci­sion inputs. Unless they are bad news sto­ries. Those we lis­ten to.

Here’s how we actu­al­ly use the finan­cial press:

Spot trou­ble ear­ly. When a com­pa­ny we own hits head­lines for fraud, sud­den C‑suite depar­tures, reg­u­la­to­ry probes, account­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties, whistle­blow­ers, that gets our atten­tion. Then we check the num­bers. Some­times we’ll put a “red flag” on a com­pa­ny until their man­age­ment lifts their game — or gets replaced.

Dis­cov­er new hunt­ing grounds. Some­times a jour­nal­ist cov­ers a com­pa­ny or sec­tor we haven’t explored. Good. We don’t buy the sto­ry. We add the com­pa­nies to our spread­sheet and see if the num­bers work.

Fil­ter the noise. Mar­ket pre­dic­tions, ana­lyst opin­ions, “experts warn,” “experts say”—none of this cor­re­lates with long-term returns. It’s enter­tain­ment cos­play­ing as insight.

The dis­tinc­tion: we don’t hate sto­ries. We refuse to out­source deci­sions to them.

Sto­ries tell you what peo­ple believe.
Num­bers tell you what the busi­ness is and how it’s doing right now.

You need both to under­stand the world. Only one should dri­ve your port­fo­lio.

As Tony often says: “If I want to hear a sto­ry, I’ll buy a book.”

Inter­est rates are going up? Great — we fol­low our rules.
Inter­est rates are going down? Great — we fol­low our rules.
Some econ­o­mist said the bub­ble is about to burst? Great — we fol­low our rules.
Some oth­er econ­o­mist said the first econ­o­mist does­n’t know what she’s talk­ing about? Great — we fol­low our rules.

If you’re new to QAV, this is the shift: stop let­ting head­lines manip­u­late your emo­tions. Start treat­ing sto­ries as noise that occa­sion­al­ly con­tains sig­nal. We have rules. We fol­low them, day-in, day-out. It makes invest­ing sim­ple and pre­dictable. And it works.

The finan­cial press can be use­ful. Just not the way most investors use it.

The mar­ket chas­es sto­ries.
We chase val­ue.

We laugh at the news cycles and keep our eye on the big pic­ture — turn­ing over rocks, look­ing for well-run com­pa­nies that we can buy at a dis­count.

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QAV Myth Killers is a week­ly col­umn in the QAV newslet­ter, tak­ing apart a piece of
invest­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom. Read the series, or
get it by email every Fri­day.

Gen­er­al advice only. Space­craft Pub­lish­ing Pty Ltd
trad­ing as QAV is a Cor­po­rate Autho­rised Rep­re­sen­ta­tive (CAR 001292718) of MF & Co.
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