Why are financial analyses written so badly?

I am always looking up company information online and come across articles from simplyWallst, The Motley fool, Zacks, among others. One thing that unites them is that they are absolutely badly written in the sense that it feels like listening to a machine voice. The wording seems to be always the same, online with the company name and the numbers changed. It doesn’t make a good reading experience.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things it is just a rant.

4 Likes

I think a lot of them are computer generated. I remember reading that somewhere.

8 Likes

I swear every Motley Fool article is just garbage designed to increase their mailing list subscriber counts.

The general template seems to be Take something that’s already happened, eg Acme Plc doubling in prince, claim to have predicted it and make a baseless prediction about something else… then promise an even bigger revelation that’s more profitable but they’ll only tell you if you sign up

4 Likes

Say im researching a stock for a potential investment, im no longer suprised to see both a bull and a bear article in the space of a week written… i.e. any british ftse 100 company :joy:

Fools indeed

Most are clickbaits to drive advertising.
Simplywallst is 100% shameless robo rubbish (just look at their revenue analysis of biotechs that have no revenue by definition). All Zacks free stuff is also machine generated and pay stuff is low quality analysis. Motley Fool is a bit more respectable but I wouldn’t pay for it. Best is to use respectable financial news sources like Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, Reuters and do your own analysis and conclusions.

1 Like

I’ve found that I’ve been better off just reading regular news about companies and their websites. A lot of the free financial ones are definitely automated. I noticed before that there are a lot of alliterative bot sites (Eg Hereford Herald) that simply contain what seems to be generic block of text linked to performance ratios.

1 Like

I subscribe to ft.com for breaking news and very unusual analysis. They were on about Wirecard for a year now.

For individual stocks I read their quarterly reports and companies house / SEC filings. They are very informative and easy to read and provide more information than any review articles.

I think most of the investment review websites, ultimately are driven to ensure everyone buys anythint, as that generates broker fees and add revenue for them.

2 Likes

The FT are brilliant. I second that

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.