I used to pay more attention to crypto news. Years ago, I mean.

I watched MTGox rise and fall, I knew what Bitcoin Cash was and that it was coming long before the fork (and Bitcoin Gold for that matter - whatever happened to that?), I saw DASH start and position itself as a real contender for high-street payments, I followed the rise and fall of the first shitcoins and memecoins.

I used to watch out for the latest updates. Not obsessively, but enthusiastically.

Now? I don't bother with most of it.

Sure, I watch for things like the Fed making announcements or when the latest inflation reports hit or when MiCA comes into force. Perhaps even the latest upcoming changes in BTC or ETH.

But I completely ignore pretty much everything else.

That might sound strange to you.

Allow me to illustrate why I've stopped bothering with a short visit to MEXC this morning, to see what the 4-hour ETH chart looked like (up, sideways, dip, up, up, hold/wobble, if you're interested).

MEXC has this little AI addition above their charts that's supposed to provide "insights". It mostly just spews promotion and random reports about market movements that it's turned into promotion.

Quick digression: I dislike AI. I hate the stupidity and commercialism around it, I can't stand the environmental cost (mostly to produce bad porn for sad men), I despise the way it's promoted when it's evidently incompetent and untrustworthy. But I don't hate the idea of computers being more "intelligently" helpful. That makes sense.

When I opened the page, the first thing it posted was roughly "Whale buys 4,200 ETH. Follow?"

I left the page to load - it's slow through VPN and MEXC will insist on popping their latest promotion over the top, which makes it worse.

When I went back, the AI had posted something like "Whale sells 5,600 ETH in 5 days, banks $1.7M. Follow?"

That's the crypto news sites.

Honestly, go and look at the first dozen crypto news sites you can think of.

There's very little real news. 90% of it is commentary with bias, and the bias is always the same: get clicks.

Same for most trading news sites and blogs.

Every time the market moves - in either direction - they all follow it with "ATH COMING!" or "CRYPTO CRASHING!"

I mean, that's normal. No one can actually predict the markets and the news is, by definition, only reporting what's happened, so all they can do to grab attention and get your clicks and keep their advertising revenue is exaggerate, make a big show of everything, be dramatic.

It's not helpful.

What's the first thing they tell you when you learn to trade? Keep emotion out of it.

What's the exact thing those news sites are using to get clicks? Emotion.

It's so easy to get dragged up or down by the constant assault of hyperbole that I simply decided not to do it any more.

Stick to the charts, watch for important stuff, ignore all the people constantly spewing bollocks.

Works for me.

How about you? Do you try to follow everything? Some of it? Talk to me!