At The Money: How to Manage Your News & Data Flow (August 13, 2025)
We live in an age of endless news and spin. We rely on data and news releases, but it’s really easy to get tripped up by all of it. How should investors manage this firehose of numbers?
Full transcript below.
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About this week’s guest:
Michael Hiltzik covers business for the Los Angeles Times, is a two-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and has authored numerous books on business.
For more info, see:
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Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify
TRANSCRIPT:
Note: This was recorded in July 2025, prior to President Trump’s firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
Barry Ritholtz: Wall Street relies on data: Economic releases, quarterly earnings performance comparisons, but it’s really easy to get tripped up by all of this math. How should investors manage this fire hose of numbers to help us navigate this firehose of numbers?
Let’s bring in pulled surprise winning reporter, Michael Hiltzik. He covers business for the Los Angeles Times. He’s a two-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and has authored numerous books on business.
Michael, let’s just start with the basics. How do you manage this endless torrent of data that comes our way?
Michael Hiltzik: That’s a good question. Mostly, I try to ignore. Most of it, and I curate what I use and what I rely on.
And basically the way I work is I start with a topic that I want to explore, a subject I want to explore, and then I go search out the data, uh, that I need. And that way, I’m not affected. I mean, there are some sources who, uh, you know, come across my emails regularly that I will pay some attention to.
But most of it, I, I don’t, and I know where to go most of the time for, for what I need.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk about that. If you’re going to be writing about or researching a particular subject, what sources of economic data do you rely on, and what sources do you find troublesome and best ignored?
Michael Hiltzik: Well, I think if I’m writing about, you know, something that touches on macroeconomics or, uh, uh, domestic economics, I think you can’t do better than the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And thus far they haven’t been, uh, undermined. Maybe a little bit, but not too much by Trump. So their data is really still reliable.
I also go to Fred, that’s the service from the St. Louis Fed that can reduce a lot of this, of the, of the data from BLS and BEA to, uh, graphical form. And I’ve published Fred Charts if there’s a month that passes without it that’s rare.
Barry Ritholtz: So how do you, I rely on those. How do you assess the credibility and accuracy of any source? Obviously, BLS and BEA and Fred have a very long track record, but what factors do you consider when you’re looking at a source of economic data?
Barry Ritholtz: Michael Hiltzik: I look at these sources, the way I look at any sources, I look for consistency.
My father was a CPA and he used to say, “Check the arithmetic.”
And I do that because, uh, you know, over the years or decades that I’ve been writing about business and finance, I look for outliers in the data. When I see something like that, it warrants further checking and skepticism, actually. I look for trends to be consistent. I look for the data to be coherent, uh, and cohesive and basically, you know, I, if I can I check one source against the other and then, try to see if doing that turns up some flaw or flaws in the. In the print,
Barry Ritholtz: So you mentioned, check the math. Are there any other common data quality issues that you encounter that investors should be aware of?
Michael Hiltzik: There is some consistent. Laws or errors or mistakes that, that I find typically in, uh, news reports that, that use the, these data, uh, and then try to draw conclusions. I think both probably feel that data that’s produced without an inflation deflator or without an acknowledgement, particularly if it’s a trend line something that I try to fix if I can, but, certainly that’s a context that is, is consistently lacking in reports of the data. Um
When I’m reading a report of a, of an economic release you know, in, in almost any newspaper. I will always try to go back to the original print, not rely on somebody’s interpretation.
I’ve just seen interpretations of data, just, uh. Be all over the place, particularly if we’re talking about government programs that rely on financial statistics like social security, uh, Medicare, Obamacare, I just, see so many problems in reporting on those programs. Because reporters don’t do the math, uh, or they don’t do their homework or they, they come at these programs through a political perspective that basically allows them to ignore what’s really happening.
Barry Ritholtz: So you mentioned making sure the data is inflation-adjusted. You and I have spoken about seasonality and, and how often that seems to trip up consumers of data. What other problems tend to arise when you see a, a commonly used? Data source or data series.
Michael Hiltzik: Well, those are the big, those are the big ones. you know, if I’m looking at a chart, if it’s a trendline chart and it doesn’t go to zero, so that you don’t really know, you can’t really tell, you know, if a change is significant or if it’s, uh, an artifact of big numbers or small numbers, I want to be suspicious about that.
We see these flaws in reporting all over the place, the major newspapers, the wire services, cable news, they are basically winging it and they’re using, uh, data, they’re using numbers that they get. They’re misinterpreting them, sometimes wilds me.
Barry Ritholtz: You, you mentioned Fred, which I really think of as an online software tool that depicts data series in a graph or an image. Any other software or tools that you find useful?
Michael Hiltzik: From time to time, at times we’ve used FactSet. We’ve used Y-charts. (I’m pretty sure that we’re not even subscribers to them anymore). But we use them, you know, for raw data, and, graphical displays. I find Yahoo Finance is as good as, as anything else. you know, when I’m using these, these sources, I do wanna go back and double check, uh, the numbers just to make sure that what, what I’m using, uh, uh, are, are the figures that were produced originally.
Barry Ritholtz: What about trade organizations? I recall frequently, especially during the financial crisis, being annoyed by a lot of the spin from the National Association of Realtors who are the original source of a lot of housing sales data.
Michael Hiltzik: I think you’re absolutely right about that. I mean, if I need to turn to an industry source or a lobbying organization or what have you, like the NAM, the franchisees have something and they all produce figures.
If I’m looking for a figure that they produce, I mean, if I want to say, you know, the National Association of Manufacturers says this, I’ll use it. But with the caveat that that. That’s who they are. You can’t always trust ’em. Uh, they are almost always talking their book, so to speak, and we have to keep that in mind and it’s gotta be reflected in what I write as well.
Some of these outfits are sources that, that I rely on to debunk, and it’s always a good column if I can say, “look, here’s what these guys said, and here’s how they got the numbers wrong, and here’s why. They probably deliberately got the numbers wrong.”
Barry Ritholtz: What about think tanks? They publish analytical data frequently, but I would hardly consider them objective or disinterested parties.
Michael Hiltzik: Yeah, I agree. Some are better than others. I will quote without too much fear. The Peterson Institute of International Economics I find consistently pretty good.
For trade, uh, issues, trade figures, trade commentary. there’s another Peterson funded, uh, think tank, the, uh, commission for the, uh, responsible federal budget that mm-hmm. I, I mean, sometimes I, I find them useful. Sometimes their, uh, analysis is so infected by, uh, ideology or partisanship that, um.
You, I, I have to walk back what I see. I have to sort of what, you know, recalculate what, what they’ve used.
Barry Ritholtz: So you had a column recently on Tesla. What about public companies? How do we evaluate things like not just earnings, but forward guidance and all sorts of sometimes it’s a little bit of happy talk about what’s coming in the future.
Michael Hiltzik: Well, I think, you know, if we’re, uh, you know, to the extent they’re putting out disclosed financials, subject to SEC oversight, they are, that is what it is. I can say this is what they’ve disclosed, this is what they’ve said.
Forward guidance to me is basically, trying to shoehorn a long-term perspective into a snapshot. It’s very rare, rare that it’s, useful at all. And it, of course, it also depends on who’s doing the forward guidance.
When we had Elon Musk, uh, you know, deliver a you know, financial Q&A just last night, I’m not sure. I’m not sure that any of that, uh, uh, is useful. Uh, any more than anything he says is useful. And it was, it was very Muskian, “We’re gonna have have robots cleaning our house and care of our children by the end of next year.
You know, I mean, his timelines are always suspect, and others are a company that’s in trouble. Um. You want to be you know, very cautious about, you know, what they’re saying. you know, a company that’s revising its forward guidance or dropping its forward guidance. I, I think we all know these are red flags.
Barry Ritholtz: I’ve been waiting for fully self-driving cars now for 10 years and it’s always two years away.
So let me ask a, a slightly. Offbeat question. early in my career, there was this entire group of conspiracy theorists who believed that the BLS was cooking the data that you couldn’t trust BEA, that all of the government sources of information were partisan and biased and completely unreliable.
That hasn’t been my experience, but, but what’s your experience like?
Michael Hiltzik: Well, no, it hasn’t been my experience. And, uh, look, the, you know, the, the, the data, the statistics that come out of those, uh, agencies, uh, uh, uh, basically, you know, these are are Time-Trend prints essentially, and they’re the benchmarks.
I think we have to rely on them as, as benchmarks. And we know that, uh, BLS and BEA, I think periodically revise their methodology, but they’re transparent about it. And, uh, you know, as long as we recognize that there’s a break in, um. In the trendline, then, I think we can deal with it safely.
But you know, politicians are always sort of attacking these sources when the, the, the numbers that they produce, you know, are inimical to their, their partisan goals. And, you know, we have to get used to it. And we’re certainly seeing that now. I think we’ll see it more, you know, we’re gonna see an attack on Fed data just intensifying.
Barry Ritholtz: What are the other pitfalls that investors should be aware of when it comes to economic data?
Michael Hiltzik: Well, I think investors always have to be sensitive to the source, uh, of the data they’re relying on. They have to be, uh, cautious about sort of second order or third order interpretations of data.
The data certainly on a macroeconomic or agency level is always accessible, but I sympathize with investors who just don’t have the time to, to go back and look. I think projections of market activity. These are, you know, never of great value. You know, projections are always good and accurate, right up to the point that they’re not so, you know, and sort of larger, larger issues, you know, when I, when I hear somebody talking about, well, uh, liquidity is gonna drive the market or something like that, I don’t really put much trust for reliance in that.
Barry Ritholtz: To wrap up, investors who are looking to learn more from economic data need to go to the original sources. Prioritize. Make sure you are aware of things like inflation adjusting and seasonal adjustments. Be wary about trade organizations and think tanks. Not all of them are objective.
The same is true about forward guidance from companies, public companies, about what they see in the future. And just generally use common sense when it comes to analyzing the endless fire hose of economic data.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to At the Money On Bloomberg.
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