It is axiomatic, in the 24-hour cycle of financial “news” from a staggering variety of cable and web-based sources, that all of us get immeasurably more financial information and opinions than we can possibly process.  Almost unconsciously, then, we may tend to home in on news and commentary that are consistent with the conclusions to which we are already temperamentally inclined.  So the question becomes: what, if any, are the beliefs (or the biases) that are dictating what gets through to us?  In so many words, how are we selecting our news or information?  And is it clear to us – what that selection process is doing to our financial planning and investing decisions?

Most often, if we are honest with ourselves, we will find that we are consistently selecting what we most want to be told: that the “news” has been broken down, for us, into a process of bias confirmation.  In other words: we keep doing the same old things we have always done and we wonder why we get what we have always got.

As any personal investor, our most important long term goals should allow us to be able to draw a sustaining income from those investments for the balance of a life time and then be passed on to the following generations to keep growing even as we withdraw from it.  We must change or eliminate the restrictions to our investment options. 

Our investment perspective should therefore be measured in long term planning, for possibly decades at a time and our portfolio be driven not by the “news or information regarding doom and gloom” but by our established goals. 

Given those goals and the timeline to reach them, we should be most influenced in our investment decision making by long-term economic and historical market data; although pass performance over time does not guarantee future success, it is by far the best indicator in which prediction of the most probable productive return on investments can be achieved.