The Hidden Cost of Following Too Many Market Creators
For about a year I told myself I was well informed. I followed a lot of people. Newsletters, a couple of Substacks, four or five YouTube channels, a folder of podcasts I nodded along to on walks. If you'd asked me whether I was on top of the market, I'd have said yes with a straight face.
Then one afternoon a stock I'd been loosely watching gapped on news, and I sat there absolutely certain that at least three of the people I followed had written something about the setup. I could not find a single one. Not in my inbox, not in my head. I had the vague warm feeling of being covered and exactly none of the actual coverage.
That's when it clicked. Following more people doesn't make you more informed. Past a certain point it makes you feel informed while quietly making you worse at it. And the reason is that the cost of following too many market creators was never really the money.
The money is the small part
Let's get the wallet stuff out of the way, because it's the part people fixate on and it's honestly the least interesting.
Yeah, subscriptions add up. Forty here, twenty there, a hundred-dollar-a-year thing you forgot renews in March. If you actually tallied it you might wince. That's a real number and it's worth knowing, and if you want to know it fast you can run the free trading-newsletter audit and it'll do the arithmetic for you in about thirty seconds.
But here's the thing. Even if every one of those subscriptions were free, you'd still have a problem. Because the expensive resource isn't your card. It's your attention, and you cannot buy more of that.
What fragmentation actually does to you
When you follow a handful of people, you can hold their thinking in your head. You know roughly where each one stands, you notice when someone changes their mind, you catch it when two of them start disagreeing about the same thing. That's genuinely useful. That's the whole point of following smart people.
When you follow twenty, none of that happens. You skim. Everything gets eleven seconds and a vague sense of "interesting" before the next thing lands. You stop being a reader and become a scroller, and the two are not the same activity even though they look identical from the outside.
The sneaky part is that scrolling feels productive. You're technically consuming market commentary all day. You're busy. But busy and informed are different things, and volume is a terrible proxy for understanding. Reading forty half-takes leaves you with less than reading four you actually absorbed, because the four you can reason with and the forty just wash over you.
I think of it like standing in a room where forty people are all talking at once. Doesn't matter how smart each one is. You can't follow any single thread, so you catch fragments, and fragments feel like knowledge without being knowledge.
The illusion of coverage is the real trap
This is the one that got me, and I think it gets most people.
When you follow a lot of creators, you develop a background belief that you're covered. Whatever happens, somebody in your feed probably addressed it. That belief is comforting and it's mostly false, because coverage you can't retrieve isn't coverage. It's just a feeling.
The test is brutally simple. Pick a ticker or a theme you care about. Now try to actually surface what the people you follow have said about it in the last couple months. Not "I think someone mentioned it." The actual passages, with names attached, so you can weigh them.
If you can do that in under a minute, great, you're genuinely covered. If you're scrolling back through your inbox squinting at subject lines and losing the thread, you're not covered. You're paying rent on the illusion of it. And the more people you add, the stronger the illusion gets and the worse your actual retrieval becomes, which is a genuinely cursed combination.
Fewer, or findable, pick one
So what do you actually do about it. There are only two honest fixes, and you need at least one.
The first is fewer. Go through your list and be ruthless about it. For each person, ask whether you can point to a specific time in the last month or two that reading them changed how you thought about something. If you can't, that's your answer, and no amount of "but they're really sharp" survives contact with "I haven't opened them since spring." If you want a framework for that cull, I wrote up exactly how I decide which subscriptions to cancel.
The second is findable. If you genuinely want to follow a lot of people, and there are decent reasons to, then the answer isn't discipline, it's tooling. You need everything they publish to land somewhere you can search by idea rather than by memory. Not "which newsletter was that in" but "what has anyone I follow said about small caps and rate cuts," and you get the real quotes back, attributed to whoever wrote them, in seconds.
That second path is genuinely why I built Adviserry. I didn't want to follow fewer people. I wanted to stop losing what they said. So it connects to your Gmail, auto-detects the trading newsletters, pulls in your YouTube channels, and turns the whole pile into one archive you can actually ask questions of, with citations back to the source. I'm biased because I made it, obviously. I made it because I was tired of the standing-in-a-loud-room feeling.
What "covered" should actually feel like
You know you've fixed this when a ticker shows up on your radar and the dread doesn't. Instead of that low background hum of "somebody covered this and I'll never find it," you just ask, and there it is. Three creators, their actual words, the dates. You read, you weigh, you form your own view, you move on.
That's the difference between following a lot of people and benefiting from a lot of people. The first is a number you can brag about. The second is a habit that quietly compounds.
I still follow more than I probably should. Old habits. But now they all pour into one place I can search instead of twenty places I can't, and the standing-in-a-loud-room feeling is mostly gone. If you're carrying that feeling right now, start with the honest count. Sometimes just seeing the list written out is the whole intervention.
Adviserry is an educational and research aggregation tool, not a registered investment adviser. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Summaries reflect what creators you follow have published. Past performance and creator commentary do not predict future results.
