SNAPPY HEADLINES

Fads come and go.

 One of the latest, especially in the news and advertising business, is stories or headlines like this: "Five Exercises You Should Never Do," or "The 10 Worse Foods For Your Left Great Toe."

Here's a recent one we came across and legions of similar ones are floating around out there: "Six Sexual Moves Celebrities Enjoy To Ramp Up Their Sex Lives." Now this one, you got to know, has it all--celebrities, sex, ecstasy. If celebrities are doing it, it must be above the rim.

Here're a few picked at random from the investing world, "Six Big Myths About 529 Plans," "10 Tax Breaks For Investors," "10 Best Mutual Funds" and "4 Ways The Market Could Surprise You." The writer of this last one, I'm pretty sure, plagiarized the idea from one of my old girlfriends.

If you don't want to miss articles like that one and others pay more attention at the checkout counter or to your evening news instead of squeezing the avocados so long at the grocery.

As any blogger who's bothered to look knows, content maybe king but snappy headlines is what's it's all about. That's just one of the many ways fledging bloggers hoping to make it big are advised to fuel their online businesses.

Here's another recent example from one of the world's leading newspapers that takes itself way too seriously, the Los Angeles Times: "The Five Biggest Lies About Entitlement Programs." 

When you go to the store to buy food do you go to buy food you don't like? How about restaurants? We've written before about those red and blue election maps that pop up every four years. We pointed out there are only two types of historians, red and blue. 

The same holds for MSM. The only difference is MSM may be a bit more subtle about it, kind of like Joe Biden or Karl Rove. In the investment world it's the bulls and the bears, the red and the blue. Same story, just a different arena. Taking stocks higher so you can then short them is not uncommon anymore than pushing them lower so you can buy them cheaper is.  

Level playing fields exist but not in this dimension. Recently, the WSJ featured an article about the world's oldest investor, a successful, 107 year-old guy who still reads two newspapers and several magazines a day and practices pretty much a buy-and-hold strategy laden with quality-type companies. 

When asked why, he said: "Because I want to know more about the companies I'm buying than the guy does who's selling."

Even the dumbest stock broker knows about front running, a law against putting on a position ahead of your clients on a stock you're hawking. The regulators' answer is full disclosure, as in we don't currently own or have a position in this equity.

Most sports today except a few like boxing have replay cameras. One boxing wag, a noted former boxing judge, recently blurted on national television this gem: "Referees are trained if they didn't see it (a headbutt), call it a punch." If you don't see it, how can you call it anything. So much for level playing fields.

And too so much for MSM, stocks, news or sports.

So we'll leave you with a quote from former President Dwight D. Eisenhower who happened to be a pretty good commanding general in his previous life, but who was caught off guard as president when he gave orders nobody bothered to carry out. It's the culture.

"If everyone is thinking the same thing, nobody is thinking."