What do you believe? 
And why do you believe it?
Truth, or programming?

The worst part of my job involves reading the news. This activity has almost nothing to do with learning about the world as much it has to do with trying to understand what information might be fueling my clients’ decisions.

The old adage “you are what you eat” is especially relevant in this context.

I have met many people who regret being lured by salesmen into costly, illiquid, ineffective investment strategies. How did this happen? Because the salesmen in question predated on the customer’s news-based biases against the government, the tax code, the financial sector, and capital markets in general. By the time the customer realized they hated what they bought, they had already signed on the dotted line.

It happens over, and over, and over again. Garbage in, garbage out.

The reason I believe reading the news has nothing to do with learning about the world is because the news is, at its core, not about informing people about the world. The news is about attracting, and holding, attention so that it can flaunt viewership numbers to prospective advertisers. That is it.

Like a wailing baby, inflammatory news content garners more concerned, concentrated, lasting attention than calm or positive content. The more the news wails, the more people watch, and the more money the news agency receives from advertising sponsors.

In this way, the news agencies opportunistically feast on our inescapable neurology. Thousands of years spent living in an untamed and toothy wilderness produced a species highly equipped and triggered to detect and respond to threats.

There is no better example of this than the recent successful launch of Space X’s largest ever rocket. You may have heard about this event in the news from headlines like this:

Or this:

Or this:

So how could I possibly call the launch successful? Because the people at Space X got exactly what they wanted out of the launch, and then some. Lowly, “government funded” NPR is the only news source I could find that directly addressed this.

In fact, you can bypass the articles and headlines altogether and watch the launch yourself. You’ll notice that the two loudest cheers – as though Taylor Swift had descended from the heavens directly into the Space X campus – occur when the rocket lifts off, and then again when it explodes. Clearly, the headlines are missing something important about what took place.

As someone who is primarily concerned with people being happy, content, and purposeful with their money, it is critically important to understand how wrong the news is about the world around us.

Like the Space X launch/explosion, news agencies, for the most part, aren’t exactly lying to us. They simply are emphasizing the most spectacular and alarming aspects of an event in favor of a more complete perspective. They cut away the meat and serve us the gristle.

Whether it is hysteria created from the collapse of two risky US banks, inflammatory political headlines, alarmist predictions about the future of democracy, or doomsday prophecies about environmental catastrophes, these stories are all fiction. They are the leavings of an industry that makes one product: attention-sucking nonsense designed, after decades of refinement, to keep you watching and, hopefully, clicking on ads from their sponsors.

In my film student days, I had the extremely good fortune of getting to meet and briefly speak with documentarian Ken Burns. I remember Ken discussing the difference between documentaries and reality in this way:

Reality is a 360º immersive experience that touches every single one of your senses. Even the most carefully crafted, objective documentary is still confined to only two senses – your eyes and ears – and can only show you what happens to appear in front of the camera lens. Further, the director chooses, to some extent, what goes in front of the camera lens. He or she then chooses what makes the final cut that an audience sees. Further, the director and sound designer choose what sounds the audience hears.

Then, after a filmmaker has sliced and diced reality to produce a “final” cut, producers, studios, TV networks, and marketing executives recommend (i.e., demand) changes based on what is most likely to make the final product as profitable as possible.

So, at the end of the day, any documentary is in many ways a diary entry from the perspective of the person who made it, and a representation of what a financing entity believes will generate revenue. It is, above all, NOT a depiction of reality. But, at least a documentary might take several months, and in most cases many years, to produce. The time involved means the filmmakers can be careful, thoughtful, and deliberate.

The news, meanwhile, is produced every single minute of every single day of every single year across increasing dozens of networks. How careful can they possibly be? How much thought can they possibly dedicate to a single segment?

As I write this, people around the world are tuning into programming they believe is showing them the world. They read about how The Fed is corrupt; that Wall Street is full of self-serving lizard people; that globalization and immigration is destroying the fabric of America; that the government wants to take their guns and money. It is a cruise ship buffet of awfulness.

From a financial standpoint, this avalanche of negativity gets priced into the market. Our depressing market performance for the past 18 months (and counting) may be as much a reflection of investors’ feelings about fiscal and monetary policy as it is the result of actual fiscal and monetary policy.

How can a financial plan navigate these crazy waters, where fiction masquerades as truth? By sticking with what has worked for 170 years and counting:

• Invest in fundamentally strong companies

• Avoid speculative investments that promise high, short term returns (looking at you, Mr. Crypto)

• Invest in registered securities

• Buy and hold real estate

• Adjust plans slowly, deliberately, and incrementally over a long period of time

• Keep abreast of changes in the tax code

• Maintain liquid assets like cash and short term Treasuries to deploy in case of emergencies or opportunities

• Minimize lifetime tax expense by taking advantage of existing rules for income tax deferral, tax-deferred growth, or tax-advantaged income

• Plan for death and wealth transfer in advance using trusts, wills, and insurance products

• Monitor income and expenses on a regular basis with a budget

Many advisors try to make planning seem overwhelmingly complex. The more confused the public is, the more amazing an advisor looks when they do something as basic as purchasing an index fund.

But, functional, efficient planning is not rocket science.

If the news has you distressed about your financial future, we would love to talk to you about where you’ve been, where you are, and where you want to go with your money. Chances are, you are not newsworthy. And that’s a beautiful thing.