Outrageous Titles Are Now The Norm In Finance Journalism

As more and more people turn to the Internet for their business and investing news, the fight for eyeballs has become intense. The most popular places to find news about your favorite stocks are websites such as Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, Business Insider, TheStreet, Forbes, Barron's, and The Wall Street Journal. You can add in a handful of others but in total, there are probably between 10 to 15 websites that pump out hourly stories on any and every stock that might be of interest.

Wth such a competitive environment for your attention, writers have figured out that the more outrageous and provocative they can make their article titles, the more click throughs they can get from readers. And you should know that many of these writers either get paid solely based on how many clicks their articles get or on some sort of combination of base salary plus clicks. The bottom line is that they want you to click on their articles, no matter what and in some/many cases are willing to put suspect titles up just to entice you to do it.

Here is a sampling of a few articles with titles that are nothing more than click bait:

4 Stocks That could Make You Rich
Apple: Is iPhone 7 Already Doomed?
Is Apple Truly Rotten To The Core?
Why Snapchat Will Take Over The World

In each case, the title is just plain silly and pure sensationalism. Of course, that is the plan because such titles are hard to ignore and most likely get substantially more clicks than titles that are less provocative.

It must be remembered that what you read on the Internet, in most cases, is free and when you have so much free "information" to choose from much of it is going to be untrustworthy. Online journalism can hardly be called that anymore as it is often freelancers pumping out words on a page hoping to get clicks. You really need to consider the source now days and over time decide which publications have the more reliable and accurate writers. Anyone who does a lot of stock research online must pay particular attention to the source in order to decide what is worth paying attention to and what should be ignored.