John T. Reed’s news blog

I need to ban Facebook comments by what I call “religious” asset boosters (gold, bitcoin, Amazon stock) and also “religious” candidate or politician supporters.In this context, “religious” means faith-based, impervious to facts and logic. With assets, this manifests itself as there is no price too high to ever pay for the asset in question. That is absolute nonsense.With politicians, it manifests itself as “my guy can do no wrong and yours can do no right.” Again, the goal at my Facebook Wall is to figure out what is correct by applying logic to pertinent facts. People who have a “religious” faith in the...

A Monday Night Football play-by-play announcer just said Atlanta may take a delay penalty deliberately to get a better angle for a field goal. They did, but Pete Carroll of Seattle declined the yardage penalty. Two idiot coaches and an idiot announcer.Bull!Once upon a time, in 1974 actually, the NFL moved the goal posts from the goal line to the end line. Before they did that, in 1972, they had made the hashes narrower moving them to their present position which are the same as the uprights of the goal posts.Before those two moves, but not since, the number of compass...

I recently was exposing you guys to some general financial analysis principles that I did not identify. I should identify them. I think I got some from the book Financial Shenanigans. And I certainly learned them at graduate business school.• The numbers giveth but the footnotes taketh away. The footnotes are more important to read than the other stuff in a financial report produced by the company.• Line graphs of multiple corporate metrics should have roughly the same slope and direction. For example, Amazon’s sales, stock price, earnings, head count should all be moving roughly the same. When the stock...

Fact checkers I welcome the arrival of public fact checkers on the news-reporting scene. Fact checkers with news organizations have long been around. I have been interviewed by dozens of media outlets over the years. Most of the bigger ones have strong, internal, fact-checking departments. Kiplinger’s Changing Times (now Personal Finance) used to drive me nuts in that regard. If I told them the sun rose in the East they would want a source. The public fact checkers report mainly on the accuracy of statements by politicians and other advocates, but also, to a lesser extent, they are fact checking...

Readers frequently tell me that Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has said something like I say. Today, I saw that in the Dilbert cartoon before a reader told me.Dilbert is having a disagreement like we often have at this wall. His opponent starts with his “condescending face.” (rolled eyes à la Anderson Cooper). #23https://www.johntreed.com/…/60887299-intellectually-honest-…When Dilbert asks for [facts or logic—to put it in my terms], his opponent laughs and expresses astonishment à la Juan Williams—another form of #23Then his opponent does the “there are so many [fact and logic errors] I don’t know where to begin” intellectually-dishonest debate tactic. #61“Pick one,”...