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So you stumbled on this blog, you just opened up a brokerage account and deposited funds so you’re good to go right? Wrong! [Insert missile coming at us a high speed]. Fortunately, we can avoid this missile by keeping this one piece of advice in mind that a lot of people seem to neglect, which is reading the news. Sounds too simple right? Well the best pieces of advice are often simple because there is nothing else to it. The greatest thing about news is that it allows you to predict the future; well not exactly but being informed about current macroeconomic situations lets you develop your investment thesis which is critical to a sound investment. In this article, we’ll talk about some of the news sources you should start with and move on from there. If you think there’s anything missing, feel free to comment below!
The first place that I look at is Morningbrew, which is a daily newsletter sent to your inbox. What I like about this service is that they compile stories into bite-sized chunks so if I don’t have time to read an entire article, I would just read these emails. Morningbrew emails are great place to start because it gives a general overview of the market for the previous day and what to expect in the future. As a subscriber for about 4 years now, I can highly vouch for this service.
The next place I like to look at is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). What I like about this journal is that WSJ is pretty much the gold standard. I personally don’t really agree with this because I like to diversify my news sources but a lot in the industry believe this. Therefore if you could only pick one news source to read, that would be the WSJ.
Another source which I think is equivalent to the WSJ is the Financial Times (FT). I find WSJ to be US-centric so if you want international markets news, I would highly recommend subscribing to FT as well. This is great for those investing in emerging markets and I personally enjoy reading FT more than the WSJ since the articles are usually more concise.
Outside of financial news sources, I also like to read Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle (DW) to get global news. It’s important to also know what’s going on outside of markets and determine how they will impact the markets. The main reasons why I like Al Jazeera and DW is because they tend to be not as biased as US mainstream news when reporting on US events. Basically the rule of thumb is that if you want to read news about a country, use a news source outside of that country. So if you want to read about news in Germany, don’t use DW; instead use BBC or CNN. It’s important to understand what the author’s intentions are and in fact it would be great practice for you to try to figure out what my intentions are when reading this article. Identifying motives and intentions allows you to consider bias when taking in information and allows you to become a better decision maker.
News Sources Mentioned in Article
- Morningbrew
- Wall Street Journal
- Financial Times
- Al Jazeera
- Deutsche Welle
- BBC
- CNN