Lazy Investing Articles

2/4/16

Because anyone of dubious credentials and experience can write anything and publish it on the Internet, and then include some ads to get some cash flowing in, we have a lot of people doing just that, and quality suffers. Unfortunately, the problem goes well beyond that. There are many sites in many different fields, where the content itself is being auto-generated by computer.

I'm going to pick on the finance/investing field, where the problem is rampant. A computer program can scan text such as a company's 10K for certain keywords and grab the numbers off of it, or scan some other finance site for the numbers. Then, the program puts together a generic article using those numbers, and viola! The webmaster has an article for their website to educate(?) their readers and, probably more important to them, generate cash. I've seen examples of this thousands of times. One typically sees these types of articles appear around earnings and dividends time.

I came across this specimen today, so I will show it for an example:

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If the webmaster actually wrote this article, he/she would know that Arch Coal has recently declared Chapter 11, and obviously cancelled their dividend some time ago. Moreover, Arch Coal trades now on the OTCMKTS as ACIIQ. Because the author was not actually taking time and effort to research the facts and just let their program run on auto-pilot, they get the embarrassing "N/A" for everything in an obviously computer-generated "article".

What can be done about these lazy authors/articles and blatant cash grabs? Simply point out these articles/sites on your social media and on well-known finance/investing websites. Then, obtain your financial/investing education from actual credentialed and experienced humans actually researching and writing actual articles, you know, like how writing used to be done.