9 Signs for a Misleading Article

I read many articles every week, and came up with ways to filter out misleading articles. This is critical for me, so I can keep my investment decisions rational and unbiased. Using the wrong article to affect investment decisions can cost you real money. Here is a quick checklist to uncover many of the misleading articles:

  1. Focuses on recent history without offering a long-term perspective.
  2. Talks to your emotions, without accompanying with data or logic.
  3. Presents recent history in present tense to imply that it will continue the same way (“stocks/bonds/pesos/you-name-it are currently out of favor”).
  4. Focuses on a narrow asset class (e.g., large U.S. stocks, the S&P 500, Japanese stocks, the BRIC countries) when discussing stock investments in general, or diversified asset classes.
  5. Presents only partial returns (e.g., index returns without dividends).
  6. Provides opinions of well-known people to give credibility, without hard data or logic to back the claims.
  7. Depends on traditions to back the claims, without providing logic (e.g. shift allocation to bonds with age, regardless of the total picture).
  8. Provides specific advice without any comments qualifying who this applies to (e.g. referring to a retiree without discussing their withdrawal rate).
  9. Offers a prediction of the near-term future of an investment (stocks, bonds, gold, etc.) with high certainty.
Disclosures Including Backtested Performance Data