We’re the last to know

Maybe I’m just sour-graping but the big, and painful lesson for me after I invested some of my small savings in the stock market in the 1990s is that small investors are really the last to know what’s really happening in listed companies.

There is in fact a mounting literature in the US that the blah-blahs of publicity-seeking analysts claiming their forecasts are based on their fundamental or technical analysis—after you really track down what they’ve been saying—are as scientific as voodoo incantations. There’s even one famous study that a random choice of stocks in the New York Stock Exchange yielded better yields than those a group of professional stockbrokers recommended.