Blinded by the Light
When the climax of the firework display is filling the sky with colours and explosions that are impossible to absorb as anything more than a momentary impression, a burglar walking into the house across the road, torch focused in a narrow beam, has an excellent chance of not being noticed.
The tendency of humans to focus on ‘big’ events or things that our instincts react to as threatening or in other ways stimulating to our bio-chemistry is well understood by those whose job is to manipulate the flow of public information.
Many a press officer will have timed a data release that must be made but which is unhelpful to their principal at exactly the time when some other major news event is grabbing the headlines. I am sure such specialists scour the weather forecasts waiting for a pending typhoon or flood so as to know when to issue that necessary but unfortunate press release saying that the department has spent several hundred million on a project that yielded no tangible economic or social benefit!
I want to look at this general tendency from the point of view of an investor who, being well educated and responsible, likes to keep up to date with world events with a view to anticipating risks and minimizing unexpected losses of portfolio value.
Now is a good time to think about the possibility that important news relevant to investors may be going ‘under the radar’, simply because the Trump/Netanyahu war of choice in the Middle East is so scarily, albeit quite logically, taking over the vast majority of news coverage and analysis.
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