Bank and Credit Report

I’ll admit it gets tiring.

The endless parade of predictions and horn tooting that passes for financial analysis and media is exhausting. The Bernays school of investment media never sleeps, and it never stops pandering to fear and greed.

It’s loud. It’s rarely right.

I could take a victory lap here. The war, the trend, credit conditions, the banking industry, and a few other things I called correctly.

It wouldn’t make either of us a dime.

Our job is to make money without dying of boredom in the process. That means keeping our eyes on the things that actually matter: valuation, margin of safety, credit conditions, and trend.

Everything else, the headlines, the politics, the Fed conspiracy theories, the vast international cabal of evil capitalists supposedly plotting the fall of the West, gets ignored (as much as possible. Sometimes it is too much fun to talk about it all) on purpose.

There’s probably a grain of truth buried in some of those theories. I could dig it up, dress it in research, and build you a grand prediction out of it. I’m told that’s the secret to success in financial publishing: find the big idea, sell the big idea.

I have sat in far too many meetings where the topic was “What Can We Sell This Week?” and not “Where is the Best Opportunity for Our Members?“

My big idea is making money. My prediction is that if we stick to the rules, we keep doing exactly that.

So we’ll start this week the way we start most weeks. With credit.