Sit down, because this one's a gem.
You're scrolling through your financial news feed. Google News, "Economy" section. A catchy headline pops up: something about compromised MacBooks, a 9to5Mac poll, looks relevant. Maybe it involves data security, supply chain, something that could move Apple — a company with a $3 trillion market cap.
You click.
And what do you get?
A cookie consent screen.
That's it. Just that. No content. No news. No paragraphs. No analysis. Nothing. Zero. The great existential void of digital journalism wrapped in a wall of "Accept all" and "Reject all" in 47 languages, including isiZulu and ລາວ.
Well, isn't that just beautiful.
The Symptom of a Bigger Disease
This isn't about a MacBook. It's not about Apple. It's about something far more serious that directly affects anyone trying to make financial decisions based on quality information.
The news ecosystem has turned into a meat grinder.
Headlines are written to generate clicks. The content behind them could be a real article, a reheated post, or — as in this glorious case — literally nothing. A privacy consent page that doesn't even load the original article.
And Google News, that all-powerful curator deciding what 2 billion people see when they open their phones in the morning, pushed this as "economy news."
Remember that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus asks Neo: "Do you want the blue pill or the red pill?" Well, here they offered you both pills and both were made of flour.
The Real Cost of Disinformation for Investors
Taleb has a quote I'll repeat until I'm blue in the face: "The greatest risk is the one you don't see."
And the risk most investors don't see is the informational garbage they consume every single day. I'm not talking about obvious fake news — like that uncle on WhatsApp saying the dollar's going back to two bucks. I'm talking about something far more insidious.
I'm talking about constant noise disguised as signal.
When your financial news feed is polluted with empty headlines, irrelevant polls, and articles that won't even load, two things happen:
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You waste time. Time you could be spending reading a 10-K, analyzing a balance sheet, or simply living your life.
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You create a false sense of being informed. Which is infinitely worse than admitting you don't know a damn thing. The investor who thinks they're informed because they read 30 headlines a day is more dangerous to their own portfolio than the one who admits ignorance and buys an ETF.
Benjamin Graham used to say the market in the short run is a voting machine, but in the long run it's a weighing machine. The problem is that today the "votes" are influenced by a tsunami of empty content that weighs absolutely nothing on the scale.
The Filter Nobody Teaches You
You know what the most valuable financial skill of 2025 is? It's not reading a candlestick chart. It's not understanding DeFi. It's not finding the next Nvidia before everyone else.
It's knowing what to ignore.
Warren Buffett lives in Omaha, Nebraska, far from Wall Street, on purpose. He reads annual reports, not news feeds. The richest man in the stock market actively shields himself from the noise you consume for free and with gusto.
Charlie Munger, rest in peace, used to say: "I never had a good idea watching CNBC."
And there you are, wasting 15 seconds clicking on a ghost article about a MacBook in the economy section.
The Final Provocation
So here's the question — and this is a real one, not cheap rhetoric:
How much of what you consumed today as "financial information" was actually information? And how much was just noise wrapped in a pretty headline?
If the answer bothers you, good. It should. Because while you're scrolling through your feed, someone with real skin in the game is reading what matters, filtering out the trash, and making decisions based on substance.
The market doesn't reward those who consume the most content. It rewards those who consume the right content.
Or, as the Joker would say: "If you're good at something, never do it for free." And Google News delivers to you for free exactly what it's worth — nothing.
