Ever wonder why you feel addicted to financial news, like you need a fix if you didn’t catch the latest market-moving hot breaking-news flash? Ever get super-anxious, like you’re detoxing when you go more than a few hours without checking in on CNBC, Fox or MarketWatch, or reading The Journal, Kiplinger’s or Money? Well, sounds like you’ve been brainwashed the “Wall Street Hype Machine,” which has turned you into a robotic junkie addicted to “The News!” … which is the goal of America’s advertising buyers.

Wall Street secret brainwashing machine

They are brainwashing you, transforming you into another one of the millions of “Manchurian Candidate” investors in America, a zombie who will do their bidding, without rationally thinking about their message. How? Very simple, by confusing you with schizoid, double-bind messages: For example, they tell you to think long-term, about asset allocations while on average they’re churning their portfolios over 100 percent annually .

They tell you to stay the course, be a patient, passive buy-and-hold investor. Then they spend $15 billion annually on advertising in the media and press while at the same time making sure their high-paid guru analysts and portfolio managers get exposure as talking heads and sound-bite providers on the same networks, channels and publications they use to control your mind through advertising.

If you look closely at so many other issues and stories and watch the cable networks or go online for data anytime through the trading day you’ll be overwhelmed with a relentless staccato barrage of ads and articles recommending thousands of stocks and funds. Remember Wall Street and its buddies have a total of 14,000 funds and 8,000 stocks that they must aggressively market at you, same as Wal-Mart pushing product.

Totally conflicting hype and propaganda

Every month you’ll see one of the major financial magazines sporting a flashy tabloid-style exploitation cover coming at you like a flashing neon sign. Over and over you’ll hear about “The 25 Best Funds,” or the “100 Best,” or “8 Greatest,” or “How to Get Rich and Retire Early” or some other hype more fitting for the cover of the National Enquirer. Still, the $15 billion a year Wall Street Hype Machine stays on message—you should long-term buy’n’hold, while at the same time forcing you into a double bind with their relentlessly, demanding advertisements grabbing the few brain cells you have left—encouraging you to buy-sell-trade now, today!

How bad is it? If you’re a mildly active investor trying to keep up with what’s happening in the world of finance, markets and the economy, you probably has at least a general sense of why you feel anxious most the time. Here’s my horseback estimate of the number of times you’re exposed to and encouraged to act by “hot tips” and action-oriented recommendations from the major financial media and print sources:

Cable television—hits you with 15,000 securities annually
Imagine watching CNBC, CNN and Fox with their daily barrage of maybe 250 market financial ads. Now add to those ads all the “recommendations” that the talking heads, anchors and hosts are hurdling at you during an 8-hour day. On the conservative side, at least 20 stocks and funds pop up on the screen every day, in ads and news reports for a total of at least fifteen thousand every year. And this hardly “fair’n’balanced” barrage doesn’t include your local business channels and network television.

Daily newspapers—another 20,000 securities per year
Now consider the added barrage that comes packaged in The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, USAToday and your local newspaper. That’s 250 issues a year for financial newspapers, 50 for Barron’s and 365 for your local newspaper, loaded with ads plus maybe another 20 “recommendations” from journalists and ads shouting for attention in just these four newspapers.

Monthly magazines—add 12,000 more securities per year
Let’s assume you’re a subscriber to all the good ones, BusinessWeek, Kiplinger’s, Money, SmartMoney plus one other that offers financial tips. That’s five magazines times twelve months with another couple hundred securities mentioned in each issue, in the ads or in articles written by journalists. That’s another twelve thousand hammering away at you all year.

Total securities “recommended” in media—48,000 per year
No wonder we’re all feeling brainwashed and manipulated, we’re constantly being programmed to be addiction to the news, which far, far exceeds the capacity of our brains to process. We get hit with forty-eight thousand advertisements and “recommendations” for financial products each and every year … that’s almost two hundred every business day!

And still Wall Street’s pundits have the audacity to contradict themselves by telling us that 3-11 funds is all the diversification your portfolio really needs! Put these two contradictory ideas together and it’s downright crazy-making—both buy’n’hold and active trading—and you get to see a highly sophisticated form of brainwashing that makes the Manchurian Candidate look like Sesame Street—at best it’s misleading entertainment, at worst it’s further numbing your ability to think rationally and discriminately.

And yes, journalists are also biased and brainwashed

And since I’m inside of the hype machine, I guess I’m guilty of the same sins. But at least most of the time my message is limited to telling you to stick to three to a max of eleven funds that make up a “Lazy Portfolio,” a well-diversified, buy’n’hold portfolio for the average passive investor based on the Nobel Prizewinning “Modern Portfolio Theory.” I do that hoping what I say will sneak past your brainwashed frontal cortex and into your brain cells that are no longer controlled by the Wall Street Hype Machine.

FirstPubDate: Aug’04