First off, before I forget, if you have an iPad or an iPhone and haven’t downloaded the free SocialTrade app, you need a check-up from the neck-up. It’s awesome, and I’m using SocialTrade far more than I used to. Please check it out (and, for the love of God, some of you users out there please take a few moments to give it a rating! Please! Consider if your way to pay me back for the cash I shelled out to create this for you!!!!!!) Hundreds of people have downloaded it, and one – count ’em – ONE – person has taken the time to give it a rating!
Anyway.
So as most of you know, I’ve got a veritable zoo full of pet peeves. A cluster of them are oriented toward the Henry Blodget firm named Business Insider. One peeve, for example, is their affection in their tweets for the phrase “Here comes….” preceding every economic report that’s coming out. It got tiresome after the first 2,000 instances. Another tweet-oriented peeve is related toward their insistence on using superlatives for every blessed event on every blessed day. Everything has to be the most Extreme of this or the most Important of that. They take pains to dilute the impact of the English language.
But the desire for clicks is, I suppose, understandable. Outright ignorance, though, is not. I offer you, from today, Exhibit A:
So, for those of you unaware of how e-mini futures operate, they don’t really “reset” until 6:00 EST. In other words, if the market dropped, as it did today, and you glanced at the ES or NQ shortly after the close, you would – understandably – see some negative numbers.
The fact is that once the Fitch news was released, the e-mini market actually inched up a bit. In short, it really didn’t give a flying crap about the news. But to the naive observer (which probably constitutes the lion’s share of the BI audience), it would seem that the Fitch news was quite the B.F.D. and that, on top of the already delicious drop we enjoyed on Tuesday, the market was getting monkey-raped even more after hours.
This was simply not the case, and it was misleading to suggest otherwise.
In the financial blogosphere, amateurs like your beloved host or, far grander, ZeroHedge, run circles around the mainstream media. And considering the dozens of writers BI has on staff, and the zillions of dollars of funding they’ve got, I think it’s pretty sad that it takes a dunce like me about half a second to deduce that the aforementioned article was wrong-headed.
I’ll close with a question – – – who do you think the most over-rated financial bloggers are? Just say so in the comments section (or, importantly, if you see the blogger already cited, just Like the comment in order to upvote it). This will be a very crude way of seeing what Slopers think are the popular but no-so-great bloggers out there (with my ulterior motive being to vent my frustration at overrated bloggers out there without pissing them off by mentioning them myself).
So you’ve got your mission: get the app, and sling the crap.
