President Trump’s paranoid aspersions aside, does anyone think the media is still on their side, fightin’ for the little guy?
The Fourth Estate, one with a given mission to (mistakenly) “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is at it again, doing all it can to induce investor panic.
The latest affront comes from USA Today on Saturday, and focuses on a possible French election 401k freak-out.
It claims the biggest market fear, or “nightmare scenario,” is that “the two candidates who are perceived as threats to growth and financial stability, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon, will make it out of the first round of voting.”
With Freddy Krueger barely at bay, one of the two—far-right candidate Marine Le Pen—made it to the second round on Sunday. Birds sang, the sun shone and people went about their daily business as the Dow rose in Monday morning trading—so USA Today should knock it off.
The piece itself isn’t as bad as its clickbait headline, but it did set out to stir Brexit and November election-style fear and its effect on 401ks, before mentioning their strong (and almost immediate) recoveries.
Thankfully, participants are finally getting the message about short-term panics and the bad behaviors that follow, despite best efforts of hysterical hacks.
As we noted in a January postmortem, 401k activity in 2016 was punctuated by a few spikes in trading activity (due to the aforementioned events) followed by long lulls of low activity, thanks largely to target date funds.
“For 2016, a net total of 2.13 percent of balances traded—slightly higher than the trailing five year average (2.02 percent), but below the trailing ten year average (2.59 percent).”
In other words, normal. So no, we don’t care about the French election (at least not in that way) and neither does our 401k, but we care a lot about USA Today and its yellow effort to attract readers.
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
