Practical analysis for investment professionals
22 July 2019

How to Read Financial News Redux: Understanding Consensus

In the first segment of this series, I described how financial news is like a crying baby: There is noise and commotion followed by a narrative that may or may not make sense. Narratives follow prices because readers want an explanation, and a consensus eventually emerges.

This consensus forms a narrative, and the consensus is also embedded in market prices. Since investors look to the future, market prices imply a set of assumptions and probabilities about what will happen. These assumptions may be optimistic or pessimistic, and these assumptions may be coherent or incoherent. Either way, consensus expectations are a logical starting point for putting any financial news in the proper context.

Subscribe Button

The Usual Suspects

I consult a variety of media, both financial and otherwise, to inform my understanding of the markets and the economy. My daily news sources are the New York TimesWall Street Journal, and Google News. No surprises there. I also subscribe to The Week, which provides contrasting political viewpoints and catches some stories I might have missed.

For investment news, the four sources below are my favorites when it comes to understanding the consensus. These fall into the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category. (They also help me question the narrative — more on that below.)

  • Dash of Insight: Jeff Miller provides comprehensive and systematic reviews in Weighing the Week Ahead (WTWA). Miller writes extensively about how to detect nonsense in the financial media and how popularity ≠ accuracy, and he has done excellent work on recession forecasting tools. I have known him for over 10 years, and I trust his judgment and integrity without any reservation. I can say the same about . . .
  • Brian Gilmartin, CFA, at Fundamentalis, who gives insightful analysis, particularly about trends in US corporate earnings. He has been at it for a long time, and his experience shows. Like Miller, Gilmartin is independent and publishes consistently, based on a disciplined method, and calls it as he sees it without a hidden agenda. Sources like Gilmartin and Miller are great assets because we can just read their work and get on with our jobs. They’re like finding a lost set of car keys: We can just stop looking, hop in the car, and drive.
  • FactSet Insight, Companies and Earnings: John Butters writes chart-intensive weekly reports on aggregate revisions and estimates for the S&P 500. FactSet Insight is simple, authoritative, and free. (FactSet used to offer Dividend Quarterly, among other quarterly reviews.)
  • JP Morgan 2019 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions: As an adviser, I make financial plans based on long-horizon expectations about inflation, expected returns, correlations, volatility, etc. The annual guide from JP Morgan provides a solid framework, and Guide to the Markets provides comprehensive updates.

A Framework for Reading Financial News

A Framework for Reading Financial News


Analyze the Frequency and Framing of Stories

What drives the interpretation of financial news? How is consensus formed?

Let’s say there is news about the trade dispute between the United States and China, and I read today’s edition of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Here is what I look for:

1. Story Selection

Did each paper cover the story? Was it on the front page? How deep was the coverage? Such editorial choices say a lot about the story.

A single article rarely changes investor sentiment though. I don’t mean that a single event does not change investor expectations, but the coverage of that event in a single article rarely influences public opinion. Story selection, therefore, is not as important as story frequency or story framing.

2. Story Frequency

The frequency of a news story does influence public opinion and investor sentiment. If everyone is writing about a topic, it must be important or at least perceived as such. For example, a slowdown in corporate earnings growth was a popular topic in the fourth quarter of 2018, as was the trade dispute in the first quarter of 2019. The frequency of coverage affects sentiment. So how do we distinguish between fads and trends? I use these three sources:

  • WTWA: In Next Week’s Theme and Final Thoughts sections, Miller teaches investors how to read the news with a critical eye.
  • DataTrek monitors trends in Google searches, which helps to quantify the frequency of various stories. Its sample on housing demonstrates the approach.
  • The Industrial Sentiment Survey from Corbin Advisors has a helpful wordcloud depicting story frequency trends.

3. Framing

How an event is framed affects the news and how it is perceived. The media can spin a story in countless ways that influence how we interpret it. I read financial news to help understand the world as it is, not how it should be. I identify the political biases of the media and act accordingly, and I do my best to remain nonpartisan.

Conservative vs. Liberal: Political bias is everywhere, so we need to spot it quickly, read multiple viewpoints, and come to our own conclusions about the underlying story. We need to keep a particular eye out for changes in how liberal and conservative media cover a story or issue: Editorial deviations from the typical left/right paradigm suggest a significant shift may be underway. When conservative sources frame a story in a liberal manner, or vice versa, something important is happening.

Take income inequality. Left-wing sources have placed it at the center of their economic narrative for years now. The conservative press, on the other hand, may have stories about the minimum wage, student debt, and access to health care, but tends not to frame these around “income inequality” per se. So if Fox News suddenly shifted gears and focused specifically and intently on income inequality, it would be important.

The chart below arranges various media outlets according to where they sit on the liberal-conservative spectrum and how accurate they are as news sources. Created by Vanessa Otero, the chart resembles a normal bell-curve, with most sources falling in the middle of the spectrum and a few at the right and left tails of the curve.

Are the media outlets conducting original unbiased reporting? Are they fabricating stories wholesale? Or are they simply putting an ideological spin on news reported elsewhere?


Media Bias Chart

Media Bias Chart


Optimistic vs. Pessimistic: Some news sources are perpetually upbeat about business and the economy. Others are permabears. We need to read both varieties and make our own interpretation.

  • In “Jobs Report Has Food for Both Bulls and Bears, a Classic Case of Confirmation Bias,” I demonstrate how we see what we want to see. In the jobs report example, optimists focused on payroll growth, and pessimists on the labor force participation rate. These are two different ways to frame the same data.
  • People are systematically pessimistic about global trends, according to Hans Rosling in Factfulness. This phenomenon is widespread across countries and professions. Moreover, 10 simple questions demonstrate that nearly all of us have basic facts wrong. Everyone is more or less equally guilty of bias and makes just as many factual errors, regardless of their intelligence or leadership skill. And I believe the media are making us more pessimistic: They want our attention, so they stoke our fears. (By the way, since investor expectations tend to be pessimistic, I suspect that long-term stock prices are on the low side.)

Short Term vs. Long Term: A news story could focus on stock returns for a month, a year, or a decade. Depending on the time frame chosen, the stories could come to contradictory conclusions. When I was an editor at The Street, some contributors were short-term traders while others were long-term investors. The contrast led to illuminating discussions or heated debates, depending on the personalities involved.

Reported Results vs. Investor Expectations: One story might say that a company’s earnings rose 20% last quarter; another that the company missed expectations. Both stories are true, but the implications are quite different.

Pro-Business vs. Anti-Business: Income inequality was originally portrayed as a political problem in the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal focused on how the minimum wage affected business costs and employment. Same story, two narratives.

Pro-Government vs. Anti-Government: Some sources are skeptical of all government statistics but offer no alternative. Others accept reported figures as gospel truth. For some reason, inflation statistics are a big battleground:

The frequency of stories and the framing of narratives around them have an enormous impact on how we perceive and interpret the news and how we survey the investment landscape. As investors, we must develop a systematic framework — a set of filters — to address this issue. But that would merit a book-length discussion.

Narratives vs. Noise

Understanding consensus expectations are only the first step in the process of interpreting financial news. The next step is filtering the narrative from the noise, which will be the subject of the next installment in this series.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.


All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: ©Getty Images/Fuse


Continuing Education for CFA Institute Members

Select articles are eligible for continuing education (CE) credit. Record credits easily using the CFA Institute Members App, available on iOS and Android.

About the Author(s)
Robert J. Martorana, CFA

The late Robert J. Martorana, CFA, worked on the buy-side as a stock analyst, portfolio manager, research director, financial advisor, and editor of a hedge-fund website. In 2009, he founded Right Blend Investing, a fee-based RIA that managed individual portfolios and did consulting for the asset management industry. RBI has one unique claim to fame in that it supported an orphanage in Andhra Pradesh, India. Martorana published over 1,000 pages of contract research and co-authored Alts Democratized by Wiley Finance.

8 thoughts on “How to Read Financial News Redux: Understanding Consensus”

  1. Rob Martorana says:

    Clarification:

    I mentioned the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling, and at the end of the section I said:

    “(By the way, since investor expectations tend to be pessimistic, I suspect that long-term stock prices are on the low side.)”

    This is vague.

    What I should have said is that the survey data in this book Factfulness consistently show that people do not know basic facts about improvements in global health and prosperity. Surveys show that people have a consistently negative bias about disease, poverty, literacy, demographic trends, etc. Since consensus expectations are demonstrably pessimistic, this is a bullish long-term indicator for the state of the global economy and global capital markets.

    That’s not very catchy but it’s more accurate.

    Rob

    Rob

  2. Rob Martorana says:

    Story selection –let me expand on my point.

    Every media outlet chooses which stories to cover and which stories to highlight. A media source may ignore some issues and be obsessed with other issues.

    Classically speaking, the media select stories based on impact, timeliness, proximity to the audience, conflict, human interest, novelty, etc. These elements are summarized in many places, including here: http://www.studylecturenotes.com/journalism-mass-communication/elements-of-news-are-immediacy-prominence-drama-oddity-conflict

    This challenge can be mitigated by reading a variety of sources. But some issues are chronically underreported because they are boring, happen slowly, lack drama, and cannot be reduced into a simple cartoon. The most underreported stories tend to be good news from a distant land, dealing with ordinary people and not marked by a dramatic event.

    Rob

  3. Carol says:

    Excellent article Rob…

    1. Rob Martorana says:

      Thanks Carol. I spent about 50 hours on it over three months.
      Rob

  4. Len Rosenthal says:

    Interesting piece that covers a lot of territory, perhaps too much.
    One thing that I find curious is that when I when to the link to Vanessa Otera, she provide no description of her expertise in media. A google search shows she is a patent attorney by training but not somebody who has any training in journalism or media. I realize that one can become an expert without a degree training but that takes a lot of study on one’s own along with some kind of training.
    I have taught investment finance for many years including behavioral finance since 1990s. I am also a small investor who has experienced the behavioral biases that we all have.

    1. Rob Martorana says:

      Len,

      Thanks for your feedback.

      Regarding the scope of the article, you said:

      “Interesting piece that covers a lot of territory, perhaps too much.”

      Thanks – that’s a fair point. The original submission was 25,000 words and may be more suitable for a book than an article.

      But allow me to explain the purpose of the article, which was to spark a some actionable recommendations based on behavioral finance.

      You mentioned:
      “I have taught investment finance for many years including behavioral finance since the 1990s. I am also a small investor who has experienced the behavioral biases that we all have.”

      Given your experience, I think we would both agree that behavioral finance is an important topic in finance. My frustration is that most of behavioral finance is designed solely to diagnose our biases, and does not suggest a treatment for our biases.

      For example, I know that I have confirmation bias when I read the news. So my investment process is designed to mitigate this bias. I would love to see how other professionals deal with the same issue, and I hope that this series of articles spurs a much-needed discussion about how to minimize our behavioral biases.

      Regarding Vanessa Otero:
      You observe that Otero “… is a patent attorney by training but not somebody who has any training in journalism or media. I realize that one can become an expert without a degree training but that takes a lot of study on one’s own along with some kind of training.”

      Fair point.

      But in Otero’s post about methodology, the third sentence says: “I am not a media expert.” https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-reasoning-and-methodology-behind-the-chart/

      In any case I believe that Otero has a sound methodology and a transparent process. This process is what’s important to me as a reader, rather than her qualifications. The quality of her research and writing speaks for itself, and she showed remarkable depth when I contacted her about one of the assumptions in her methodology.

      The question was about why she uses a simple left/right political axis. Otero wrote:
      “…several forces, including our country’s two-party system, tend to flatten those other dimensions into the liberal-conservative dimension that most Americans easily recognize. As Steven Pinker states in his book Blank Slate, “while many things in life are arranged along a continuum, decisions must often be binary.” For more on this concept, see Pinker’s book or Maxwell Stearn’s writing on political dimensionality here.”
      Pinker’s book: https://stevenpinker.com/publications/blank-slate
      Max Stearns: https://www.blindspotblog.us/single-post/2017/04/14/Ideological-Blindspots-part-IV-The-Dimensionality-of-Trumpism

      I followed these links and eventually wound up reading “Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell to understand the underlying assumptions. I believe that Otero used these sources accurately, and this gives me confidence in her work.

      If Otero has a secret agenda, I do not know. I base my opinion on her published work.

      Thanks again for your comments,
      Rob

  5. Kirk Cornwell says:

    Anything pointing the average investor toward an open mind regarding contrarian thinking is good. While one does not need to act on contrarian ideas or conclusions, investment decision-making while considering them will avoid many mistakes of “following the herd”. For every buy, there is a sell, “screaming to get out”.

    1. Rob Martorana says:

      Kirk,
      Well said.
      : )
      Rob

Leave a Reply to Rob Martorana Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *



By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close