I think ZH is a great site, and I read it daily, BUT if you don't take it with a truckload of salt then it will be hazardous to your wealth. Seriously, if you had been in the ZH bear trade since 2009, then you missed out on the greatest stock market rally in a generation. I know, because I missed the first half of said rally as a ZH reader until I realized that the constant drumbeat of negative news from that site was distorting my judgement.

Here is what ZH is good for: they have stuff before anyone else, because they'll print almost anything. For instance, after San Bernardino those guys had details way before other outlets, because they're willing to go to press with just "some guy overheard this on the police scanner and tweeted it".

So when you read ZH you see stuff first, but you place a big mental asterisk by it until their scoop trickles up the media food chain and starts to get confirmed as real reporters do actual work on it.

I like seeing stuff first, before everyone else gets it, hence my continued regular reading of ZH (again, I keep a 40lb bag of Morton Salt by my desk with the ZH logo on it, though).

I stopped reading this site some years ago. It had, and probably still has some interesting opinins and analysis. Most content is pretty far fetched / sensationalist, but if you have your grain of salt, this is not a problem, since most media outlets do this in one form or another.

About 2 years ago the tenor of the publications shifted from libertarian to more and more reactionary (bordering on proto-fascist). When I skip the articles nowdays, I think that the authors have no problem with authoritarianism, as long as taxes are reduced and social welfare is gutted (it is obviously not stated as such, but most opinion-pieces speak for themself).

I don't know what could have caused that shift, but I think you can generate more traffic and hence more profit, Lokey view on this explains a lot.

ZH's response: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

If no one has been to the site before here it is: http://www.zerohedge.com/

Believe it or not it has a huge following in the finance world due to it often being one of the first ones to break or provide color on important stories.

It's not uncommon at all to see a row of traders with tweet deck open allocating a single column to Zero hedge, they are just that prolific with their output.

The downside of the site is that they tend to have a very big bearish slant though. No one has ever accused them of being neutral.

I hope they continue to run the site. I find it provides a fair bit of value to me.

Zerohedge is one of the most remarkable web sites today. I started reading it after 2009 and today it's (along with HN) my daily read.

For me as a Westerner there are few places where I can read non-mainstream opinions on things like the war in Syria, the oil price and currency wars, the daily SNAFU in the financial worldlike Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP).

To be sure, the headlines are often sensationalist but the content often exceeds whatever analysis you can get to read from mainstream media (= the big online newspapers in the US, and Europe).

Here is Zerohedge's response to the above article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

I have a love hate relationship with Zerohedge.

On the one hand, they can produce some really amazing and compelling content, whether its their own analysis or an analysis of an article from somewhere else on the web. A recent article of memory: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-17/what-just-happened-....

But over the years the site's tone has changed. While they are still dedicated to financial news and insights, they post a lot of survivalist non-sense and it feels more like a far Right wing blog now, advocating you to buy gold in one article that sits below another highlighting proof that the gold market is fixed. I can support a position of reporting on everything and anything, but these inconsistencies and the fact that there is a dearth of articles with viewpoints and analysis from the Left has led me to question their true motives now. They'll also censor you for trying to bring this up in their comments section. A few years ago my account was banned after I called them out for putting up an article stating how some Goldman report was BS, while simultaneously they had up a blog post that used stats from a different Goldman report.

I still visit the site everyday. They still occasionally break some headline stories and you still find some really great articles. But generally it's become an insufferable website.

A for profit news editorial site based on sensationalism. Why is anyone surprised? That's "news" today. Just turn on the television in the US. I haven't been able to watch CNN since the mid-90's.

I think whether you like the site or not depends mostly on if you think there was a fundamental recovery after 2008 or just an asset bubble generated by extremely easy monetary policy around the world.

Only time will tell who's "right" in the end!

ZH is the infowars of the financial world.

The huge pro Russia bias just became unbearable after a while. Whatever Putin does is consider awesome, whatever Obama does is considered bad. China coverage seemed somewhat more balanced.

Well...this just succeeded in adding more readership to ZH. Their "anti-article" to the Bloomberg piece is fascinating reading.

They published an answer to the article. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

With some reluctance, I follow ZH on Twitter. Like other sites like Russian Times, Haretz, Al Jazera, it is good to be skeptical, but it is also good to break out of the hold that mainstream media has. In the USA, the "news" is so bad that I honestly believe that I get more information from random reading, just a few minutes a day, of sources from many countries on the web than the network "news."

I travel a fair amount, and it seems like people in other countries don't have an obsession with "news" that so many of my acquaintances in the USA have. I think that one hour a week is about the maximum amount of time anyone should spend on the news - better to spend the time engaging in business, family and friend time, write a book, volunteer with a charity, community involvement, etc.

You mean the "the sky is falling so sell everything and buy gold" blog?

Might be good entertainment for wannabe daytraders and inexperienced retails, but they're almost always wrong about things...

I love the potential conflict of interest statement in the article: "Bloomberg LP competes with Zero Hedge in providing financial news and information."

It's funny that one of the largest flag theory sites, sovereign man, refers to zerohedge almost exclusively for political and financial theories. I thought they were actually run by the same person(s) for a time.

When I came across zerohedge about 2 years ago, it looked like they were bearish all the time, and right less than half the time. I think people see what's right and don't pay attention to when it's wrong.

Was an interesting site in the beginning, but got stupider and stupider. My guess based on this article is that it's a 419-style strategy; stupid people don't use adblockers as much.

Avid ZH reader since before it had its own domain -- this list is incomplete. There are several bloggers who have posted links to their work under the name durden.

Used to have really ground breaking investigatve journalism in obscure market structure stuff. Went sensational click bait.

I stopped reading the site several years back. It has too much of a end of the world doom and gloom view. Yes it does provide a different view against what you see in the mainstream news. You tend to get sucked into this worldview it presents, and you end up getting very little done on your side projects.

Here is ZH's article about the unmasking

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/502779 is the best from ZH

>> "Bloomberg LP competes with Zero Hedge in providing financial news and information."

Translation: "Yes, we're attacking the competition."

_____

Reply-To-Comments-Below:

All editors make choices, and to me, this was the wrong choice.

All this does in validate ZeroHedge is a threat and makes Bloomberg look like a wannabe thug.

Beyond that, appears ZeroHedge made something of this disclaimer too: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

Like many here, I've read ZeroHedge for a few years. I loosely agree with the analysis that the tone has become "conspiratorial," but this argument fails to disambiguate between a "conspiratorial" tone and the intentionally provocative rhetoric of the ZeroHedge authors. They KNOW their content falls under all those labels so derisively ascribed to it, because that is their intention.

My reading of the [conspiratorial|far-fetched|proto-facist] content on ZeroHedge is that it's not meant to be literal, but a veneer of SHOCK VALUE that serves two purposes. First, it gets readership due to classic clickbait psychology. Second, its mere existence demonstrably proves ZeroHedge is an "alternative" media site undiluted by editorial filters. This distinguishes it from every mainstream media publication, and that alone makes it worth reading (provided you can find some signal worth your time).

The shock value signals to astute readers that ZeroHedge is not a traditional site, and that yes, you SHOULD take everything they say with a grain of salt. But the logical jump from "you should take it with a grain of salt" to "you should ignore it" misses the simple fact that its writers INTEND for the content to be provocative. They WANT you to take it with a grain of salt.

Taking things "with a grain of salt" is GOOD for you. It means you are THINKING CRITICALLY. People should be taking everything with a grain of salt. What alarms me most about ZeroHedge is not its content, but the attempted ostracizing of that content by other publications, as if the shock value justifies ignoring it all together. Incidentally, this is the same smear tactic that mainstream media sites are applying to Donald Trump: he says <thing> we find offensive, therefore <every other thing> he says must be invalid. If we applied this logic to all information, there would be no difference of opinion in the world.

To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the person yelling "fire" might be the one worth listening to, and we should always question our own beliefs and fear consensus. To quote him directly, they [0] were "the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed... [W]ho’s going to decide?" [1] [2]

[0] "They" were the socialist party of philadelphia, who opposed the draft of WWI, "on the grounds that military conscription constituted involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU (thanks to HN commenter in another thread for linking to this today)

[2] http://documents.ariadacapo.net/borrowed/2006_11_christopher...

15 posts a day of as much as 1500 words? That's kind of... prodigious.

> (Bloomberg LP competes with Zero Hedge in providing financial news and information.)

Does anyone else feel this is particularly generous?

ZeroHedge is borderline conspiracy theorist nonsense surrounded by occasionally correct financial analysis with a level of accuracy on par with a dart board.

ZH may be early and there may be some separation of the wheat from the chaff that one must do, but their general bearish theme resonates as true based on the data.

The BLS numbers are phony. They monkey around with the denominator, so drop-outs from the workforce are not counted. They also count one person losing a good full-time job but gaining multiple part-time jobs as a net positive. Never mind those numbers---all you need to know is that the adult labor force participation rate is at its lowest in about 4 decades.[0] The ratio of average income to home prices is about twice that of the 50s/60s (over 3.3) Also, if unemployment were measured as it was decades earlier, the unemployment number would be much higher. Outside of tech, where tons of money has flowed thanks to the Fed's helicopter money and investors seeking higher returns (as interest rates are ~0), the economy has been doing lousy. Yet all we're told via mainstream sources is that the Fed and Obama saved the day and shutup about it already!

As others have noted, this expansion is long-in-the-tooth, at least by historical standards. Companies' inventories are up, which also signals an economic slowdown in the works. After QE1, QE2, QE3, and bond buying totaling $4 trillion (!) of expansion of the monetary supply, we've had a paltry sub-3% GDP growth (0.5% in the first quarter of this year!). A former Fed board member admitted recently that they "front-loaded" the recovery; indeed, it should be noted that this "recovery" is almost a direct result of the Fed's actions regarding monetary expansion. This also explains the fantastic increase in asset values (classic cars, houses, art, stocks, etc.)

The Fed is a private cartel. It is the third central bank in the history of the U.S., and was created so the banks would no longer be forced to compete with each other. It is not independent of politics (far from it)---for example, Yellen knows she should raise interest rates, but knows that the Democrats will be thrown out of office if she does before 2016 (see the minuscule 25 basis-point increase that caused huge market turmoil late last year), and a Republican would throw her out the day he was sworn in. Even if you don't believe the "conspiracy", the fact of the matter is that central planning is disastrous, and it is especially disastrous when it comes to the price of currency (i.e., interest rates), as that affects everything else in an advanced economy (especially long-term capital investments).

ZH has done a good job keeping us apprised of these developments. They operate under the assumption that the current fiat currently standard cannot survive, and they are right. Of course the timing is virtually impossible, but I (like them) predict a bad recession in the next year or two. Over the longer term, the system will inevitably collapse.

[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/02/percentage-w...