How Reading the Wall Street Journal Helped my Financial Life & Outlook

I have had a Wall Street Journal subscription ever since the first year of business school, when one of our professors instilled in us the prudence of reading the Wall Street Journal every day. The Wall Street Journal is something special for a business manager, investor, stock market and finance guy. It is the last word on how the market is moving, and often, it is also the first word that makes it move. A few words of praise in the Wall Street Journal can hike up the stock price of a company, helping it make millions in a day; one negative sentiment, and a stock can drop many fold and destroy a business. The Wall Street Journal has an immense power on the economy of the US and thereby on the whole world; no other magazine is a kingmaker like the Wall Street Journal.

I realized this power of the Wall Street Journal when I first started investing in the NYSE in a small scale. At that time I was a young and enthusiastic student, still fresh from the classroom, and I used to do a lot of research on companies that I would then invest small amounts of chump change in. Once we had a bet, just between friends, on who could predict the best mover in a day’s trade, just by doing research. So we all did diligent research, and I found a stock that seemed to me to be trading lower than it should, given its potential. I found the stock to be very interesting, and not only did I bet on it, I put in a couple hundred dollars – all my savings – on it.

I lost the bet, because on the day of reckoning, my stock did not move very well compared to some of the more well known regular movers my friends had chosen.

Then, a few days later, the Wall Street Journal came out with a report on that stock. Someone must have noticed what I did, because the report was pretty enthusiastic and recommended an immediate Buy. The next morning, that stock started trading like crazy, and by noontime, I had gained quite a bit of money. At the end of the day, when trading ended, that little stock had skyrocketed into a 200% gain, and I had made my first solid investment. I felt like Warren Buffett on one of his good days, and was forever 'worshipful' of the great WSJ.

That’s the power the Wall Street Journal has on the market. I am sure there were other investors who had found that stock as I had done, and had invested in it, hoping to make money on it. Some of these may have been reporters of lesser journals even, who had probably written good stuff about it. But it took the Wall Street Journal to say something good about it before the market took heed of the stock and gave it a rise.