No matter what industry you work in, it’s important to stay on top of cutting edge news and technology. Refusing to accept change and innovation is what separates the successful from the not so successful. There’s been a lot of breaking news lately about the stock market reaching all time highs and how that affects your portfolio; I’ve ignored most of it. The key is knowing when to take action and when to tune the noise out.
The reason why I’ve ignored this particular news is that I don’t care what happens on a day to day or even month to month basis. I have a 30+ year investing time frame so any actions that I take should not be made in haste. I like to base my investing off empirical evidence and fact, not conjecture and guessing. Although, there’s no guarantee that the stock market will continue to rise, I like my chances. I’m well diversified with appropriate US and International market caps along with bonds and real estate.
News in Industry
One thing I’ve learned is to never use news as a basis for investing. Anything you hear on the radio, tv or in print has already been acted on. If some talking head on TV has great insight on a company, why would he share it? The talking head would probably leverage everything he had and go all in on that stock if he really knew something we didn’t.
I have a friend in the insurance market who gave me the idea to follow news about his own company. He set up google alerts and spends a few minutes every day reading relevant news stories. He gets some of his insurance news from Lloyds but uses various sources all over the internet to compile the whole picture.
News in Your Industry
I think we would all like to know what’s going on with the companies we work for, but sometimes it takes a little extra effort to get everything in order. My company was recently taken over so there have been tons of rumors about salary, lay-offs, etc but most of those turned out to be false. Any time a story starts with “I know a guy” or “Steve told me” I always take it with a grain of salt; I never trust a rumor unless I hear it first person.
It’s important to know what’s going on in your own industry for the sake of your career. If you work in the aerospace industry like me, wouldn’t you want to know where the industry is headed? Every day, I spend a couple minutes reading and reviewing airline related news. Who’s sold what recently and what do growth projections look like.
The news is nearly always pretty positive for the airline makers but not so much for the airlines themselves. I even used some of my ‘insider’ info to buy American Airlines a few months ago when it was at only 50 cents.
It’s obviously important to check the news and stay up to date on your company but you don’t need to take it too far. It can help you see trends before they start or even inspire you to make a career move before it’s too late. I’m not saying you need to be on top of it all but you don’t want to be the guy saying the internet is just a fad or the British guy who said, “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
Readers, have you read any interesting news lately? Do you follow the news in your industry or just ignore it?
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I follow news about my company as well. We have a section on our intranet about industry articles and I always read the ones about us and most of the ones about our competitors to get an idea of what is going on. A great way to stay up to speed.
Nice, yea we have one of those too. It’s awesome since they do a nice short recap of all the important stories.
I work in the media, so keeping up with news is kind of the pinnacle of the job. Industry specific news … well, that’s pretty darn depressing.
Haha yea I can imagine. I would probably be overwhelmed working in the media, so much information to digest 🙂
I follow it to a certain extent, but you have to know what to take with a grain of salt and what to pay a little more attention to. Being in advertising we have to stay up on the news but a lot of it is just fluff or useless. Our favorite source for news is generally NPR as they cover a lot of things others will not.
Yea that’s a good point. I like NPR too, I listen to it all the time and it’s cool that they do local news in addition to national news in an unbiased and professional manner.
Any company that want to maintain and grow their business should keep up with what’s happening and what are the trends in their industry. This is an excellent approach to maintaining your services or product and making sure that your existing clients or customer comes back. This also give you the advantage of staying on top of your competitors.
You’re right Paul, I think it’s a good way to help you stay on top of your competitors too.