Stupid headlines!

This item caught my eye as I was catching up on the news this morning:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- U.S. retail sales unexpectedly fell in August, pushed lower by plunging gasoline prices, according to Commerce Department data released Friday.

Huh??? Gas prices down, so retail shopping is down? What are you smoking, dude? If that sentence had read 'sales pushed higher by plunging gas prices' I wouldn't have stopped, because we've been hearing that for a couple years. But this headline made me stop. Of course, down in the bowels of the article the writer quoted his source which said the opposite, and properly so. But the point is, when the financial world is in a near panic mode and looking over its' shoulder for the next train wreck, we're going to read irrational stuff in the media. If you're an investor or in a business where the state of the global economy is critical to your business, you've got to ignore the panic scripts. Read the statistics and ignore the interpretations of those statistics. Then draw your own conclusions. You'll be ready when your market is ready.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Procurement software? Bah, Humbug!

The Wall Street Journal carried an article this week discussing web spending tools, that is to say software that helps businesses control costs by telling them where they’re spending their money. It’s called procurement software and it sells for big bucks to big companies. Most companies are not big companies, and most of them can get the same results by learning how to read their own financial reports, IF they also learn how to ask for the information they don’t see in the standard forms their software spits out every month.

Too many managers are frustrated because they don’t see what they need or they don’t understand what they see and they don’t know what to do about it. They don’t understand what is possible and reasonable to expect from their financial departments, so they accept that it’s a different language and they lower their expectations. With all due respect to their skills, I call this Financial Illiteracy.

Some of the most creative CEOs I’ve known keep numbers on the back of an envelope – or the equivalent – because it’s the only think they understand. How sad is that? If you know anyone in that state of affairs, do them a huge favor. Tell them to call me.

As always, I welcome your comments.