KEY POINTS:
I am a fraud. Actually, so are most business journalists. Our job is to tell punters what to do with their jack. But frankly, none of us are exactly investing prodigies. I have known many business journalists and I know most of them don't have a share certificate to their name, let alone an elegantly proportioned portfolio.
Sure, the plumber's house has a leaky tap, the cobbler's children have no shoes and as offspring of doctors - like me - would attest, Papa Doc will barely look up from his newspaper if you complain your leg has fallen off.
Business journalists are like plumbers who have never turned on a tap - even though they have read a lot about water reticulation. It's a case of do what I say, not what I do.
The $64 question is: If business journalists are such clever clogs at analysing investment opportunities, why aren't they swimming in gravy? While I was writing about the movements of the Brierley share price, I was scrabbling to pay my mortgage - with $10 left over for a bottle of Fairhall River Claret. (And my pay was reasonable so I take full responsibility for being rubbish with money.)
Taking financial advice from a finance journalist is a bit like taking dieting advice from a 130kg nutritionist. Or having a miserable life coach.
Of course there are some exceptions - Brian Gaynor actually made a pile of spondulicks in the giddy 1980s, so presumably knows of what he speaks, but most business journalists drive 1998 Nissan hatchbacks, live in mortgaged villas in West Auckland and wear cheap shoes. That isn't necessarily a reflection of low intelligence. An Ohio State University study that analysed 7000 people since 1979 found that being brighter didn't have any impact on income or net worth.
The surprising thing the study did find was that people with high IQs tended to have more credit card problems and reported higher levels of financial distress - which sounds like the usual shabby state of affairs for freebie-loving hacks. (What's the difference between a shopping trolley and a journalist? You can fit more food and booze in a journalist.)
Getting back to my theory about fraudulent business journalists, if they wanted to get rich they wouldn't have chosen this profession in the first place.
A lot of them don't bother to disguise their contempt for capitalism and wealth, although I suspect Bob Jones' theory is correct. Curmudgeonly hacks would write perky stories if they were paid $250K a year. Embarrassingly, when journalists make money from their own tip-offs it tends to be really dodgy, like the City Slickers columnists on Britain's Mirror, convicted of conspiracy to breach financial regulations. They were buying shares in computer company Viglen which they would then spruik in the paper. What I'd really like to read is an investment column written by Wayne Thomas Patterson. He nicked $3.4 million off the taxpayer in benefit fraud but invested the money so savvily that the Government will get it all back plus half a mill profit after costs are deducted - a 20 per cent return.
Now that's someone whose advice would be worth reading.
