Connecting Data to Wealth Creation
Connecting Data to Wealth Creation
An analyst’s morning no longer begins with a crisp newspaper and a cup of coffee. It begins with a digital firehose. One moment, you’re staring at a cryptic squawk from a Fed governor, all caps and no context. The next, you’re hitting a broken link on a major social media platform, the data stream simply cut off. And then, trying to access a simple market commentary, you’re confronted with a legal document so dense and sprawling it would make a corporate lawyer’s eyes glaze over. This isn’t a hypothetical; this is the reality of processing financial information today.
The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed. We are inundated with data points, but the quality of that data—its context, its reliability, its actual utility—is in a state of freefall. We’re told more information leads to better decisions, but what if the opposite is true? What if the deluge is the problem? The challenge is no longer finding information; it’s excavating a single, verifiable fact from a mountain of digital detritus.
Consider the recent Fed Governor Stephen Miran speaks on the Federal Reserve with CNBC's Sara Eisen, delivered not through a carefully prepared speech but via the staccato bursts of a market news squawk. We get the headline data point: "EXPECT TO GET TO 2% INFLATION ON HEADLINE PCE IN ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF." This is the signal, the quantifiable forecast that models can ingest. It’s the core of the message. But look at what surrounds it.
The transmission is a jumble of fragmented thoughts. A procedural note about having the needed data for the October meeting. A personal career update that he hasn't discussed staying past January 31. A curt dismissal of gold's record price ("DO NOT CARE THAT GOLD IS AT A RECORD"). And a deflection on a personnel issue ("LISA COOK'S FIRING IS A QUESTION FOR LAWYERS"). Each of these fragments is presented with the same weight, the same all-caps urgency. I've looked at hundreds of these squawks, and this compression of nuance is a consistent and worrying trend. The market-moving inflation forecast is given the same typographical priority as a comment about his personal travel schedule might be.
This is the disintegration of context. Was the comment on gold delivered with a dismissive wave, or was it a carefully worded statement to downplay its role as an economic indicator? What was the full question that prompted the remark about Lisa Cook? We don't know. The raw data has been stripped of its texture, leaving behind a collection of disjointed statements that we are forced to reassemble. How can anyone accurately model geopolitical risk premium when the official’s own view is reduced to a four-word bark? Are we making better decisions with this information, or are we just making faster ones based on a caricature of the real discussion?
If the squawk feed represents information stripped bare, then the modern corporate disclosure represents the opposite pathology: information buried alive. Take, for instance, the cookie notice from a major financial news outlet like CNBC. It’s a masterpiece of obfuscation disguised as transparency, a document running thousands of words (the one I reviewed was over 1,500—to be more exact, 1,582 words) detailing the intricate web of trackers, beacons, and scripts monitoring your every click.
This document is the perfect metaphor for the modern data problem. It’s a massive data dump designed to induce fatigue, not understanding. It’s like a company trying to satisfy its SEC filing requirements by mailing investors a shipping container filled with every single employee expense report and interoffice memo from the last fiscal year. All the information is technically there, but it’s functionally useless. The goal isn’t to inform you that they use "Measurement and Analytics Cookies" and "Social Media Cookies"; the goal is to get you to click "Accept All" in a state of exhausted resignation.
This weaponized transparency creates a new kind of noise. It’s the illusion of control. You are presented with dozens of toggles and links to opt-out mechanisms for Google, Omniture, Mixpanel, Facebook, and Twitter, creating a procedural maze that only the most dedicated privacy advocate would ever navigate. The system is designed for failure. And this isn't just about ads. This approach bleeds into all corporate communications, from ESG reports to shareholder letters, where volume is often used to mask a lack of substance. When the platform delivering the Fed governor's quotes is itself a black box of data extraction (and occasionally, just a broken JavaScript error), how much confidence can we have in the entire information supply chain? What happens when the infrastructure for information becomes as convoluted as the information itself?
My core conclusion is this: the sheer volume and immediacy of data we now receive is a liability, not an asset. The economic cost of "free" information is the cognitive burden it places on the end user to filter, verify, and contextualize it. That burden is becoming unsustainably high. We've optimized for the speed of transmission at the expense of clarity and reliability. The result is an environment where a central banker's nuanced economic outlook is flattened into a tweet, and a simple act of reading a market summary requires tacit agreement to a surveillance apparatus detailed in a document nobody reads. The signal isn't just noisy; in many cases, it's being deliberately jammed by the very platforms promising to deliver it. And that is a systemic risk that no inflation model can calculate.