Profiting from news and events?

Just thought I’d share this lesson I was taught in case it helps anyone (been investing 17 years, learned from some pretty smart people along the way). When it comes to news and investing it’s pretty tempting to think a) that big ‘news’ events will affect the market, and b) that you can buy / sell something to benefit and profit from that news.

The truth though? It’s doesn’t happen anywhere near as much as we think it does.

The way that I think about it is on one extreme you have:
– ‘really big news that crashes the market’ and then on the other end you have,
– ‘really big news that a lot of people THINK is gonna the market then nothing really happens.’

Now when you really think about it, which of these happens more? It’s definitely the second one.

Just think, in the last few months all the chat we’ve had about debt ceiling stuff, Iran nuclear facilities bombings, the Ukraine war, Venezuela, Greenland, investigating the Fed chair, Iran protests, on again, off again tariffs with a dozen different places. And how all of those things were gonna be bad for the market or even crash it. Hasn’t really happened has it?

The strategy of successful investors I learned from was to just tune out a lot of that stuff as ‘noise’ cause living in all that noise and trying to react to it all is actually super distracting and not great for your investing.

And by investing I mean buying businesses that do their thing well and holding them while they grow their earnings and their value grows with that. If you want to trade day to day news, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s basically a coin flip so the odds aren’t with you there.