Archive for May 2008
#8 Digesting Information
This post sort of strays from the norm. But I think it’s necessary. It’ll be short and sweet, I promise.
I read an interesting article from SeekingAlpha.com by Matthew Hougan called “Has the Internet Made Us Better Investors?” You can read it here. In it, the author talks about how he did not have internet in his office, and woe and behold, got tons of work done. Then he goes on to say that the amount of information we have our fingertips might be overload. And that’s the meat of the issue I want to get to.
This kind of goes back to using research resources efficiently. There is so much information we have to digest on a daily, hourly, minutely (word?) basis that there is no way for our brain to functionally process it all.
First of all, information needs to be presented in a useful way. This is one of the problems I face everyday. I’m reading all these publications that basically regurgitate the same information, maybe with a tad bit of differentiating analysis from each… Maybe 10%. So 90% of the information presented on an article is either 1) something I’ve already read about and know, or 2) something I’ve already read about and know, but presented in such an obtuse way that it confuses me. Either way, it sucks.
Alright, so I guess that was more of a rant… Probably not informative at all. But keep that in mind next time you’re reading something. Are you wasting your time or are you really learning something new? And if you are learning something new, is this really the best way to go about doing so?
A last reference to that article from SeekingAlpha.com. The author poses a question near the end: Is the average investor doing any better today (assuming we have so much information at our fingertips) than they were 10 or 20 years ago?
That’s interesting, isn’t it? Today, it takes all of 10 minutes to do some solid due diligence on a company. 10 years ago, it would have taken a hell of a lot longer and a hell of a lot more work. But “is the average investor making more sensible decisions?”
Something to think about…
