When I first started investing, I was very naive. This was decades ago, and so I would tune in to business channels on TV and listen to talking heads recommend various investments. I'd listen to some celebrity “professional” convince me that they were looking out for my best interest, wanting to provide guidance and advice, picking great companies to help me achieve success. I bought it. Hook line and sinker. I remember one pitching a REIT back then, and I poured my hard earned money into it and dreamed of gains in the distant future that would allow me to retire one day. Fuuuuuuuuck that guy. Within a matter of days from pumping the fund, it began plummeting. At that point I started a deep investigation. Furious and driven. Turned out that the advisor was actually close friends with the funds founding family. They golfed together on the weekends, wined and dined, the best of buddies. The fund managers spouses had been freely given tens of thousands of shares, and they began dumping on the market shortly after he pumped it. To this very day, it hasn't recovered. I look back at that tight circle of friends ever so often, and they are all ultra wealthy now. Pension plans, 401Ks, and little people like me that bought into their hype, and some even continued to buy as they cleverly dumped on them and even began selling off underlying assets, properties that made the fund have actual value, did not have a clue. But I did. And I never forgot. The game is rigged. It's that simple. And to play the game, at the very least, you need to know that EVERYONE is in it for themselves. Every advisor, every analyst, every fund manager, every trader. How much they disclose, the advice they spread, take it all with a grain of salt. Some are much worse than others. Some are just blatant liars, consistently, constantly.
So, that is what I'm looking for. I've identified a few, which have somehow polluted my brokerage apps feed. They are consistently, constantly, flat out lying. It's annoying to find a barrage of their “information” in my feeds, but because they lost 100% of my trust, they are merely noise now. I'm not worried about them.
What I am concerned about is who can I trust. What sites, what advisors, etc. In the past, we'd all lean on each other, collect as much information as we could, study the companies and markets and leaders and employees ourselves. I'd even dig into the individuals' histories, those in the company, those leading the company, the innovators, the builders, the creators, and then look for connections to various fund management companies, who almost always supplant someone to steer the company up or down or sideways, whatever their agenda is, to work in their favor. If you delve deep enough, you can find the same people or some organizations of people, often playing the same tactics. But, this is no longer 1980, 1990, 2000, or 2010. The year is 2023, and we have very sophisticated AI and vast mountains of data.
Is there anyone out there profiling analysts and advisors and organizations with sophisticated tech to identify who is accurate, who is honest, and who has bent objectives? If not, is this something people would be willing to pay for, to highlight the people who are either flat out lying to us or even more cleverly just trying to gently steer sentiment in their favor? It doesn't mean we have to completely ignore them, but if we could just shine a quantifier light on the worst offenders, that would be very helpful.
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