Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.
“This is a masterpiece.”
—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money
“Discover the extraordinary within.”
—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam Holdings
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Douglas MacArthur was the American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II and later ran occupied Japan. William Manchester, in his biography of MacArthur, mentioned how in 1950, when MacArthur was in Tokyo, he read exactly five newspapers every morning. What’s unusual was that these newspapers were all at least three days old. His staff thought he was losing it. Why would the Supreme Commander want stale news when fresh news arrived by the hour?
MacArthur’s reasoning was simple. Three days gave the initial panic time to settle. It let him see which stories actually stuck around and which ones everyone had already forgotten about.
For him, this delay acted as a filter because it cut out all noise and what remained, if anything, was signal.
Nassim Taleb, in his book of aphorisms The Bed of Procrustes, wrote:
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
This is such a powerful thought. Most of what passes for urgent news has zero shelf life. Even if you read it a week later, you’ll see how little of it actually mattered. Taleb was talking about newspapers, but the principle applies even more to social media, where information decays not in weeks but in hours.
I rarely read newspapers, but when I accidentally pick up one, I think about these ideas of MacArthur’s and Taleb’s. And I especially think about them while sitting across people who keep checking their notifications about market moves, news explaining why everything is about to rise or collapse, and a feed full of other people sounding very certain about very complicated things. My mobile has none of such apps and none of such notifications, but it’s amusing to see people talk and behave while consuming such noise.
Unfortunately, that’s the time we are living in. I think of it as an age of “manufactured urgency.” Everything is breaking news. Every data point demands immediate analysis. The market hiccups and someone, somewhere, is ready to explain exactly why and what it means for your portfolio.
For investors, this creates a peculiar kind of hell. You’re supposed to be informed because you are made to believe that gives you some kind of edge against others. But how do you find an edge when everyone has access to the same information at the same time?
The answer, increasingly, seems to be that you don’t play that game at all.
I haven’t played that game for long, and believe me, it’s so peaceful not being a part of it at all. Just me and my silence, almost all the time.
You see, our brains aren’t good at sorting the flood of information in real time. Every piece of information, regardless of quality, takes up mental real estate. It doesn’t matter if it’s valuable or garbage, it still occupies space in your head.
Just look at the Indian investing space right now. The rupee drops, and suddenly every talking head on TV has a crystal-clear view of where it’s going and what it means for your portfolio. Trump tweets about tariffs, and overnight you’ve got a thousand trade policy experts telling you exactly which sectors are doomed and which will thrive. The Budget gets announced, and your social media feed becomes an explosion of instant analysis. Then come the GDP numbers, FII outflows, oil prices, the Fed’s latest move, some new geopolitical crisis, and whatever Elon Musk just posted that might shake up markets. Every single thing feels like it needs your immediate attention.
But the uncomfortable truth is that having a view on most of these things doesn’t help you invest better. In fact, it probably makes you worse. Because these hastily formed and socially validated views become the lens through which you see everything else.
You start making investment decisions not based on what companies are worth but based on your macro narrative about rupee depreciation or tariff impacts. And that narrative, more often than not, is just educated guessing dressed up as analysis.
The rupee depreciates by 2%, and suddenly you’re rethinking your entire portfolio. Why? Did the fundamental economics of the businesses you own really change? Or did you just absorb someone else’s panic and mistake it for insight?
I know a very successful investor who doesn’t have a Twitter account. Doesn’t check financial news sites. Doesn’t listen to earnings calls live. He reads annual reports, reads books, talks to people who work in the industries he invests in. That’s it. When I asked him about it once, he said, “I don’t want to know what the market thinks today. I want to know what’s actually happening.”
This gap between what the market thinks versus what’s happening is where real investing occurs. But you can’t see that gap when you’re inside the noise, because in that moment, you’re not thinking independently. You’re thinking in relation to everyone else’s thinking.
Now, I am not saying that the crowd is always wrong. It is right sometimes. But it is always loud, and loudness distorts things. It makes small problems seem enormous and makes enormous problems seem manageable if the right people are being optimistic that day. It turns investing into a game of reading social cues instead of reading balance sheets.
When the Budget announcement happens, do you really need seventeen different takes on what it means? Or do you need to understand how it specifically affects the two or three companies you own or are considering buying? Those are different questions requiring different kinds of work. The first keeps you busy. The second makes you money.
Most investment mistakes aren’t failures of information. They’re failures of judgment. You had the information, like everyone did. But you misjudged what it meant because you were processing it in a rush, surrounded by other people’s opinions.
I’m not arguing for total isolation. You do need to stay informed about the businesses you own and the industries you follow. The question is: what’s the minimum effective dose of information? For most investors, that ratio is way lower than they think. You probably need about 10% of the information you’re currently consuming. Maybe less. The rest is entertainment dressed up as education.
So, here’s a task I have for you. Before you open that market news app or scroll through financial Twitter, ask yourself: “Will this information change what I do? Not what I think, but what I do?”
If a story about FII outflows won’t make you buy or sell anything, why are you reading it? If rupee movements don’t affect your actual investment decisions, why are you tracking them tick by tick?
Start with one day a week where you don’t check any market news. Just one day. See what happens to your portfolio. See what happens to your mind. My guess is that your portfolio will be fine, and your mind will be better.
MacArthur with his three-day-old newspapers understood that most of what seems urgent isn’t important, and most of what’s important isn’t urgent. The delay helps you tell the difference. Maybe we all need a version of that delay now. A buffer between the world’s noise and our own judgment.
Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.
“This is a masterpiece.”
—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money
“Discover the extraordinary within.”
—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam Holdings
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