My column two weeks ago was about the passing of my good friend and Tupelo treasure, Rob Barnes, who died from complications of the coronavirus. In the hard copy of the paper my byline is at the end of the article. In the digital copy they put my name right before the headline and it read, “Scott Reed: Tupelo Mourns the Death of a Wealthy Man.” My family got numerous calls. I was happy to see that some people apparently did mourn my inaccurate death. I was disappointed to see that a lot of people didn’t read the column, only the headline. If they had read it they would have known that I was talking about Rob.

In an odd way, that snafu is what my message today is all about. There are a lot of headlines out there. When I am in a hurry I use the headlines to decide what articles I will read in the paper each morning. Sometimes I use the headlines to determine the way I think so I don’t have to read the article. Sometimes the headlines are misleading and convey a completely inaccurate message.

You don’t have to look farther than the coronavirus to understand how easy it is to misunderstand the information. Every source seems to report the numbers differently. Are the numbers cumulative or are there new cases this week? If someone with coronavirus dies in a car wreck are they counted as coronavirus deaths or not? If you look at the state numbers the number of deaths added to the number of people who have survived coronavirus don’t add up to the number of people who have had it. Either you die, or you don’t, so I don’t know what the third category is. An old quote goes, “If you torture the numbers long enough, they will tell you anything.”

We are about to go into the final stages of the race for the Presidency of the United States and it seems that both sides are more than willing to mislead you with the facts. My father used to say, “Half the truth is often a great lie.” You will be getting a lot of half-truths in the next couple of months. It is in your best interest to fight the white noise that is out there. Fight those that want to take the news and twist it. Find unbiased information (I never said this would be easy) and make decisions based on how you feel about the information, not based on how someone with an agenda other than your own may feel about it.

Both candidates have policies that would be good for your investments. Both candidates have policies that would be bad for your investments. There is a lot that goes into being President of the United States. You can’t be satisfied with listening to people who are trying to promote their own agenda. You have to do the work or you will make choices that are not in your best interest. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the massive amount of conflicts of interest that exist in the reporting of news today does not make it easy to find the facts.

But we must try. We must be better than we have been or emotion will take over and that is normally not a good thing for your portfolio. I remember the tag line for the TV show Dragnet at times like this, “Just the facts ma’am.”