Bad news travels fast.

• Position: Investing - Brief Article

I stole that headline from Plutarch. But, as he confesses in his Moralia, he also filched the phrase. "That proverbial saying, 'Bad news travels fast and far.'" Shakespeare wasn't too proud to purloin plots for his plays from the old Greek's writings, so who am Ito refrain from lifting a line to help me clamber into this column?

Besides, just how quickly could ill tidings arrive at the pace of sandal-shod feet? True, as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, he could always shuffle into the temple for a few forecasts from the Oracle -- the 1st century equivalent of tuning into Squawk Box on CNBC. As recent events have shown, even a third-rate soothsayer up to his knuckles in bird guts was probably no worse than your average Wall Street analyst pecking his laptop to augur next-quarter earnings of a Nasdaq high-flier.

All of which is why I have learned to loathe the Internet. No, not because I had climbed aboard some dot-coms that crumpled like the Hindenburg ("What once sprang from the earth sinks back into the earth" -- this time robbing a Roman, Lucretius), but because I now know too much too soon. When I first got into investing, I kept score, at most, once or twice a week. It was cumbersome -- tracing an ink-stained fingertip down columns of agate type on the stock pages, then multiplying closing prices by the shares I held and, finally, toting up everything to determine whether I had made or lost money. Since...