Michael Shulman

Why You Should Be Mad as Hell at the Financial Media

    Tweet This

Free Trading Guides

The Virginia rest stops we passed driving here were closed (the state is broke). There was no line at Olive Garden (the only sane place to feed three teenage boys). And homes that were for sale in 2007 and 2008 are still for sale, as is raw land and anything related to real estate.

But according to the shiny suits on CNBC, real estate is rebounding. Where, Prague?

At current rates of sales growth in the residential housing market, we will hit 2007 levels in 13 to 17 years. The banks still have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad loans, and loan defaults and foreclosures are increasing.

Traders and Pundits Controlling the Market

I am fed up not so much with the fact that the market has temporarily decided to ignore fundamentals (baseball managers sometimes do the same thing and they are my heroes), but with the traders who are dominating the market to the point that stocks are no longer a true investment vehicle.

I do fundamentals -- short what is broken, buy what is doing very well.

And anyone who passed third-grade math and has a passable acquaintance with the English language can see -- make that, should see -- that the economy is a wreck, the green shoots are really brown, the rise we will see in GDP is statistical and not in the real world, and that the optimism of the pundits is really that of traders touting their own books on CNBC. (For a good laugh, check out the hilarious piece in The Onion titled, CNBC: 'Anyone Who Owns A Suit Can Come On Television'.)

Now, what should you do about it?