A very happy new year to all of those reading this post.
Among the journalist fraternity, my encounter leads me to conclude that there are three types of journalist, especially those writing in the personal finance or very specifically stock domain.
The first is type and the most common are those who would air their view as a classic text book stereotype of a journalist, they would say, 'As a journalist I am not supposed to take a side. it is my job to provide all views and let the reader form the conclusion.' It makes sense to follow this approach when people are giving sector views and explaining the big picture of a business. For example a big picture story would be of Adani's bet on the coal industry: Click here.
Second type that I would come across is the one which gives an opinion, but it is always delivered with if and but, or the final opinion will be that of an expert substantiating the view that the writer believes. This is also a common tactics, I will not share any example, if you observe then you can spot it easier. Happens everywhere.
Now the most intriguing types are the ones who recommend stocks on their own and are blunt about it. But this is rare and few. The biggest drawback or problem that I see with this category is that they rarely make assessment of the overall performance of the various recommendations they have given throughout the year. And also on what went wrong with their recommendations. I think the right thing to do would be to review the stocks/funds quarterly or annually and not limit to that but also discuss about what went wrong. A near example would be what FundsIndia did recently, when it talked about all of its recommendations in 2014. (Click here)
Perhaps it is this willingness to discuss and accept about what went wrong that differentiates an investor's approach to a punter's approach. Maybe by this definition or approach we can easily say that most, not all, of the journalist's writing on stocks are actually punters
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