Reading the Financial Times cover to cover every day for a week
My friend Jim reads the paper version of the Financial Times every day. He’s an investor. I always dismissed the paper as something not for me.
However, I saw this tweet and I was curious again about the FT:
Challenge: read the FT every day, cover-to-cover, for a week.
— dustin curtis (@dcurtis) January 23, 2019
You'll very quickly discover two things: 1. the power of compounding returns on learning, and 2. what often seems like useless out-of-domain knowledge--the stories you'd skip--tend to pay the biggest dividends later.
Trying it for $1 and 7.5 hrs of my time
I’d imagine I can read the paper in about an hour and a half (90 minutes). And there are 5 business days in a week. So that would be 7 1/2 hours of time spent reading to understand if it’s valuable. Oh, and there’s a 30 day trial for $1.
What you might learn from doing it yourself
Broader themes
- Lots of focus on the EU and UK specifically.
- Limited US political drama but still the main things compared with US news outlets
- For world events, perspective on how X event affects the business world
Overall, there are lots of things I have in my head that I didn’t before. Will I use them? Maybe. I do enjoy knowing a little more about elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo and how things are shaping up around Brexit.
I’m going to keep going for the rest of the trial and see how I’m feeling about making reading the FT part of my routine.