It could have been often said that the first step to becoming the best investor is a simple one — turn off the TV.

Top financial channel — along with its competitors — will only make you dumber and poorer.

This arrives as a surprise to a lot of people. In fact, financial channels present a gentle stream of well-credentialed experts, men and women with amazing titles from major firms. Nearly everyone have PhDs, years of experience, or manage huge sums of money. They give the impression of being good. They sound sharp. They’ve got insightful thoughts and reams of arcane investment data tripping off their tongues.

How can listening to them perhaps make you a worse trader?

Since the unstated premise behind these programs — that exist, obviously, on the way to sell advertising — is that investors needs to be in a near-constant state of response:

“The market is making a new high today. What should traders do now?”

“The Fed has left rates of interest unchanged. What should investors do at present?

“GNP was up an unexpectedly strong 3.8 percent previous quarter. What must investors do at present?”

They make on an analyst with a bullish view and another with a bearish one — on shares, bonds, currencies, commodities, interest rates, or the economy — allow them to square off for after sometime, followed by cut to commercials. A few minutes later, they come back and do it some more. This goes on day after day, every week, every year.

Why do so many intelligent, talented, educated people spend countless hours staring blankly in the tube?

The short reply, obviously, is we like it.

But can we, actually? Is watching TV more fulfilling than what you would be doing if you were not?

If you get specific about it, you can feel somewhat ridiculous. For example, have you ever told yourself something like:
Gee, I actually need to get further exercise, however Dancing With all the Stars is on in ten minutes.
I promised my daughter I would train her how to play chess, but these Seinfeld re-runs are very funny. It’s long past time I stopped in to visit my aging grandmother, but I am unable to miss the playoffs!
I promised for myself I’d figure out how to play the piano this time, but in the week will be the finals of American Idol.
I actually do like to plant that garden. However I can not miss my soaps.
If we’re challenged, certainly, we’ve got a lot of rationalizations.

Let a TV critic tell you that many programming is mindless junk and you may point to the learning stuff on The History Channel, Discovery, or National Geographic, regardless of whether that is only a fraction of what you watch.

If he replies that you are still being subjected to several hours of commercials each week, you advise him you tape the shows and fast-forward through them.

If he counters that taping just enables you to consume even more television, you possibly can all the time play your trump card: “Mind your own business.”

After all, you are an adult. It’s your life to survive. You can still spend it any style you want.

However, between South Park and Grey’s Anatomy, do you ever reflect on the way you’re spending it?

Regardless how nice the programming is — and let’s face it, several of it is excellent — or else how rapidly you fast-forward through the commercials, the time you spend before the tube is time you haven’t spent pursuing your goals, living out your desires, or simply interacting with another human being. If you’re aged and companionless — or housebound for some other cause — that’s different. But that doesn’t describe the majority of us.

Twenty-five years before, Neil Postman warned of our consuming love affair with television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. From the book — a jeremiad about the danger of turning serious conversations about politics, business, religion, and science into entertainment packages — he argues that TV is generating not the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 but rather of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Religious devastation is more likely to appear from an enemy using a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother will not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There isn’t any need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. Whenever a population becomes distracted by trivia, while cultural life is redefined like a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public talk gets a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.”

He concludes that we’d all be improved off if television got worse, not better.

According to A.C. Nielsen, 99 percent of American households contain a television set. Two-thirds have more than three. These sets are on an average of six hours and 47 minutes every day.

49 percentage of Americans polled say they spend a lot time in front of the TV. It’s not difficult to see why. The common viewer watches on average 4 hours of Television daily. That is two months of non-stop TV-watching per year. Within a 65-year life, one could have used nine years glued to the tube.

You already understand how little you will gain by watching so much TV. But have you as well considered what it can be costing you?

Subscribe to the free Weekly Wealth Letter to learn the most powerful and valuable information about best performing stocks, funds and ETFs. Weekly Wealth Letter is loaded with unique insights and powerful resources for wealth building through smart investing. Click here to download your copy now.

Tags

Country Music News

Related posts

• PAPER STOCKS FOR POSTCARDS (0)