Ignore The Man Behind The Curtain

I thought of this quote today as I heard Bob Pisani recap the day as he said not to look at Microsoft and one or two other active names on the board that were down.

A lot of people realize this type of overt cheerleading that goes on but there is a lot of less obvious bias that works its way onto the TV screen and into print. This is not a call to turn off the tube. CNBC is useful for news that breaks during the day. Honing your BS detector could make CNBC more useful.

Speaking of, Maria got interviews with two reasonably big fish today, each interview lasted about 2 minutes and we got almost nothing. I would like to see these interviews stretch a little longer and perhaps someone else could prepare her questions.

One last rant, do the folks producing Squawk Box really think that insight about fill in the blank is more useful coming from a journalist than someone who is actually in the business?

A couple of days ago I put up another post about the Jensen Fund and just like the first time it drew a lot of comments. First thank you for the comments.

A couple of comments seemed to agree with me and a couple seemed to say that fund might be a good hold. One comment asked for my opinion about an index fund that is as large cap biased as JENSX. The question threw me because I did not take the fund to be a mega cap and it isn't. Morningstar says the average cap is $34 billion. This is almost mid-cap territory, almost. I don't use any actively managed OEFs in my practice or personally so I don't have a suggestion.

This starts to get at the problem with OEFs in the first place. There is no way to do any forward looking analysis about a fund. "I think the fund will continue to do well" is a comment I hear and read a fair bit and it makes no sense. There is no way to know what the next big shift might be. The next big shift in a fund could possibly turn out to be the single best move the manager ever makes in his career or the worst, it is unknowable.

This applies to broad funds more so than funds with narrow objectives IMO. I could not argue with any list of drawbacks associated with any of the investment products I use so it boils down to what you can live with in your portfolio.