How to Tune Out the Noise: An XEQT Investor's Guide to Ignoring Financial Media

I woke up one Tuesday morning in early 2025 to a push notification from BNN Bloomberg that read: “Markets in freefall — worst opening since 2020.”

My heart rate spiked before my feet hit the floor. I grabbed my phone, opened Wealthsimple, and watched my XEQT position bleeding red. Down $2,800 from the day before. I sat on the edge of the bed doing mental math – how much could I lose if this kept going? Should I sell before it gets worse? Was this the start of something terrible?

I spent the entire morning distracted. I checked the app four times before lunch. I Googled “is the market crashing 2025” and read three articles that made me feel progressively worse.

Then by 1:30 PM, the market had recovered about two-thirds of the morning drop. By market close, my XEQT position was down less than $400 from the day before – a completely unremarkable daily move. By the end of the week, it was green.

I had spent an entire morning in a state of low-grade financial panic because of a push notification. The emotional whiplash – from terror to relief to embarrassment – was exhausting. And the worst part was that nothing had actually happened. Not to my portfolio, not to my strategy, not to my life. The only thing that had changed was my blood pressure.

That was the morning I realized that financial news was not helping me invest. It was making me worse at it. And if you are a Canadian investor holding XEQT in your TFSA, RRSP, or non-registered account, there is a very good chance it is doing the same thing to you.

1. The Financial Media Business Model: Selling Fear and Greed

Here is something most investors never think about: financial news outlets are not in the business of helping you build wealth. They are in the business of selling your attention to advertisers.

Think about that for a second. BNN Bloomberg, CNBC, the financial sections of the Globe and Mail, the CBC business desk, every market podcast – they all run on the same fuel: your eyeballs. And what gets your eyeballs? The same thing that has always worked in media: fear and greed.

A headline that says “Markets had a normal day, nothing to worry about” generates zero clicks. A headline that says “IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END?” generates millions. The incentives are completely misaligned with your interests as a long-term investor.

The Fear Machine

Fear is the most powerful engagement tool in financial media. Every 5% market dip becomes “Is this the big one?” Every geopolitical tension becomes “Markets bracing for impact.” Every rate decision becomes “The move that could change everything.”

The pattern is always the same: something happens, media amplifies it with urgent language, experts speculate about worst-case scenarios, you feel compelled to act, and then the situation resolves itself with no follow-up. Rinse and repeat, every single week, for the rest of your investing life.

Expert Predictions Are a Coin Flip

Here is a stat that should permanently change how you consume financial media: expert market predictions are right roughly 50% of the time. That is the same accuracy as flipping a coin.

CXO Advisory Group tracked over 6,500 market predictions from well-known financial experts and pundits between 2005 and 2012. The average accuracy was 47.4%. Not just bad – worse than random chance.

These are the people being brought on television to tell you what the market will do next. They are wearing expensive suits, they have impressive titles, and they are statistically no better than a coin toss. Yet their confident predictions drive millions of investors to make emotional decisions every single day.

2. Scary Headlines vs. What Actually Happened

This is my favourite exercise for building immunity to financial news. Look at the most terrifying headlines from the past decade and then check what actually happened to the market over the following year.

Every single one of these headlines felt like the end of the world at the time. I remember most of them vividly. The 2020 crash in particular had me genuinely questioning whether I should sell everything and hide in a savings account. I wrote about that experience in my post on FOMO, fear, and staying the course.

If you had acted on any of these headlines – if you had sold and waited for things to “settle down” – you would have missed some of the best returns in market history. The pattern is remarkably consistent: scary headlines come, markets dip, markets recover, and new scary headlines replace the old ones.

3. The Attention Tax: How Financial News Costs You Real Money

Consuming financial news does not just waste your time. It changes your behaviour in ways that have a measurable dollar cost. I think of it as the attention tax – the real money you lose because you are paying attention to things that do not matter.

More Checking = More Panic Selling

A landmark study by behavioural economists Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler found that investors who evaluated their portfolio more frequently allocated significantly less to equities. Investors who reviewed returns quarterly put 67% of their money into stocks. Those who reviewed monthly put in only 41%.

Same investors, same options, same information. The only difference was how often they looked. The more you look, the more red days you see, and the more conservative (and lower-returning) your decisions become.

I have written about this in more detail in my post on how to stop checking your portfolio, but the short version is this: on any given day, there is roughly a 46% chance your portfolio is in the red. Check every day and you are guaranteed a constant stream of small emotional gut punches. Check quarterly and you see green the vast majority of the time. Same portfolio, radically different emotional experience.

The Behaviour Gap

Every year, the research firm DALBAR publishes a study comparing fund returns to investor returns. The gap is staggering. Over a 20-year period, the average equity fund returned roughly 10% annually. The average equity fund investor earned only about 6%. That 4% annual gap is almost entirely explained by poor timing – buying after rallies (greed) and selling after dips (fear).

Four percent per year might not sound dramatic. But compounded over decades, it is the difference between retiring comfortably and working an extra ten years.

Two hundred and nineteen thousand dollars. That is what the attention tax can cost you over a 25-year investing career. Not because you picked the wrong fund, but because you watched the news and let it change your behaviour.

4. Why XEQT Investors Specifically Should Ignore the Noise

If you hold individual stocks, I understand why you might feel the need to follow the news. A single company can be blindsided by a lawsuit, a bad earnings report, or a management scandal. Individual stocks carry idiosyncratic risk that requires monitoring.

But XEQT is a fundamentally different kind of investment. Here is why the news is even less relevant to you than it is to the average investor.

You Own the Entire World

XEQT holds over 9,000 stocks across approximately 49 countries. When a headline screams about one company, one sector, or even one country’s economy, it is talking about a tiny fraction of what you own. A single stock crashing 50% might move your XEQT position by 0.01%.

I explored this in depth in my piece on XEQT’s geographic diversification. The short version: no single news event can significantly damage a portfolio that owns virtually every publicly traded company on earth.

BlackRock Is Doing the Work

One of the most underrated features of XEQT is that BlackRock rebalances it for you. When one region or asset class drops, XEQT’s internal allocation shifts automatically. You do not need to read the news to figure out whether to move money from Canadian stocks to international stocks. That is literally what you are paying the 0.20% MER for.

Every time you feel the urge to “do something” in response to a headline, remind yourself: BlackRock already did it. Their team of portfolio managers and quantitative analysts is monitoring global markets around the clock so that you do not have to.

Your Time Horizon Is Decades, Not Days

The news cycle operates on a timeline of hours. Your investing timeline is measured in decades. A headline about today’s market drop is irrelevant to someone who is not touching their money for 20 years. It is like checking the weather forecast in Tokyo when you live in Toronto – technically information, but completely useless for your life.

You are not a day trader. You are a wealth builder. The information a day trader needs (real-time price data, breaking news, earnings surprises) is not just useless to you – it is actively harmful. It creates urgency where none exists and tempts you to play a game you are not playing.

5. The Financial Media Diet: A Practical Framework

After my BNN push notification incident, I went on what I call a financial media diet. Not a complete blackout – I am not suggesting you stick your head in the sand. But a deliberate, structured reduction of the financial noise in your life. Here is exactly what I did and what I recommend.

Step 1: Delete Stock Market Apps (or Kill the Notifications)

This was the single most impactful change I made. I deleted the BNN app from my phone. I turned off all Wealthsimple push notifications except for deposit confirmations. I removed the stock ticker widget from my phone’s home screen.

If deleting the apps feels too extreme, at minimum do this:

• Turn off all push notifications for market news
• Turn off price alerts (you do not need them)
• Remove portfolio widgets from your home screen
• Turn off breaking news alerts from any financial apps

You are not missing anything. I promise. Nothing that happens in the market between your quarterly check-ins requires your immediate attention.

Step 2: Check Your Portfolio Quarterly (At Most)

I went from checking my portfolio multiple times per day to checking it once per quarter. Four times per year. That is it.

Here is my schedule:

• January: Review end-of-year performance, confirm contribution room for TFSA and RRSP
• April: Quick check after RRSP deadline, make sure auto-invest is still running
• July: Mid-year glance, nothing more
• October: Quick check, adjust contributions if income changed

Each review takes about 15 minutes. I log in, note the total balance, confirm my automatic purchases are running, and log out. No analysis. No comparison to benchmarks. No Googling what the market did.

Step 3: Replace Financial News with One Annual Review

Instead of consuming daily financial news, I do one proper portfolio review per year. Usually in January, when the previous year’s numbers are in. I look at:

• Total portfolio value vs. one year ago
• Total contributions made during the year
• Whether my overall asset allocation still makes sense for my age
• Whether my TFSA and RRSP contribution room needs adjusting

That single annual review gives me more useful information than 365 days of financial news ever did.

Step 4: Unfollow the Prediction Machine

I unfollowed every social media account that makes market predictions. TikTok and Instagram finance gurus, YouTube channels with “SELL EVERYTHING NOW” thumbnails, Twitter/X pundits with daily market takes, Reddit threads focused on timing. All of them.

I wrote about the broader problem with social media and investing in a separate post, but the specific action here is simple: if someone is telling you what the market will do next, unfollow them.

Step 5: Keep a Few Quality Sources

Going on a financial media diet does not mean total information blackout. A few quality sources are genuinely worth your time:

• Canadian Couch Potato (canadiancouchpotato.com) – Dan Bortolotti’s blog is the gold standard for Canadian passive investors. He publishes infrequently and focuses on strategy, not predictions.
• Ben Felix on YouTube – Evidence-based, academic-quality investing content with no clickbait.
• r/PersonalFinanceCanada – Despite being Reddit, this community is genuinely helpful and consistently recommends sensible approaches (including XEQT).
• Your brokerage’s annual statements – Dry, factual, and actually useful.

Notice what these sources have in common: they do not make predictions, they do not use fear-based framing, and they focus on long-term strategy. That is the filter.

6. What IS Worth Paying Attention To (The Short List)

If 99% of financial news is noise, what is the 1% that actually matters to an XEQT investor? Here is the complete list. It is much shorter than you might expect.

Major Life Changes

• Getting married or divorced – affects tax planning, shared accounts, and beneficiary designations
• Having kids – may change your risk tolerance and timeline
• Changing jobs – new income level, new employer pension or RRSP matching
• Receiving an inheritance or windfall – may need to adjust how you deploy a lump sum
• Buying a home – may require accessing some invested funds

Changes to Your Income or Expenses

If your income goes up significantly, you should increase your XEQT contributions. If your expenses spike (new mortgage, childcare), you may need to temporarily reduce them. These are real changes that affect your actual financial plan.

Changes to Contribution Room

The CRA announces TFSA and RRSP contribution limits annually. This is one of the few pieces of “news” that directly affects your investing strategy. The 2026 TFSA limit, your RRSP deduction limit on your notice of assessment – these are worth knowing.

Tax Rule Changes

Occasionally the federal government changes tax rules that affect investors. The capital gains inclusion rate changes, adjustments to TFSA limits, or new rules around registered accounts – these are rare but worth knowing when they happen. Your annual tax filing or a quick scan of your CRA My Account will catch these.

Your Asset Allocation as You Age

As you get older and closer to retirement, your allocation may need to shift. An XEQT investor in their 20s might be perfectly comfortable with 100% equities. The same investor at 55 might want to start adding some bonds or a balanced fund. This is a slow, gradual consideration – not something you adjust based on a news cycle.

That is the entire list. Everything else – earnings reports, GDP numbers, central bank press conferences, geopolitical tensions, analyst upgrades, sector rotations – is noise for an XEQT investor. Not noise in general (some of it is interesting), but noise for the purpose of managing your specific portfolio.

7. The “Set It and Forget It” XEQT Advantage

One of the most powerful things about XEQT is that it is designed to be boring. It is designed to not need your attention. And that is not a bug – it is the feature that will make you rich.

Automate Everything

If you are using Wealthsimple, set up automatic recurring purchases of XEQT. Every payday, a set amount moves from your bank account into your Wealthsimple account and is automatically invested. No decision required. No checking the market. No “is now a good time?” deliberation.

When your investing runs on autopilot, there is no moment of hesitation where a scary headline can derail you. The money moves, XEQT gets purchased, and you go on with your life. The fewer decisions you make, the fewer chances you have to make a bad one.

There is a famous (and possibly apocryphal) story about a Fidelity study that found their best-performing accounts belonged to investors who were either dead or had forgotten they had accounts. Whether literally true or not, the point is well supported by data: the less you tinker, the better you do.

What My Investing Life Looks Like Now

• Twice per month: Wealthsimple automatically purchases XEQT. I get a confirmation email that I usually ignore.
• Once per quarter: I spend 10 minutes logging in to note my balance and confirm auto-invest is running.
• Once per year: I do a proper 30-minute review – check total growth, review contribution room, and adjust my monthly amount if my income changed.
• Zero times per year: I react to a headline, make a trade based on news, or Google “should I sell XEQT.”

Total time spent on investing per year: approximately 3 hours. Calm, deliberate, and stress-free.

8. Three Mental Tests to Stay Noise-Proof

Tuning out the noise is a mindset you build over time. Here are three frameworks that have helped me the most.

The “Would This Change My Plan?” Test: Every time a headline grabs your attention, ask: “Does this change my plan to buy and hold XEQT for the next 20 years?” Markets dropped 3%? Does not change my plan. Recession fears? Does not change my plan. New tariffs? Does not change my plan. The only things that change your plan are on the short list above: life changes, income changes, contribution room, and your age-based allocation.

The “What Would I Have Done in 2020?” Test: During the COVID crash, the market dropped 34% in four weeks. If you had sold at the bottom, you would have locked in massive losses and missed one of the fastest recoveries in history. Every time you feel the urge to act on a headline, ask: what would have happened if I had acted on the scariest headline of the last decade? The answer is always the same.

The “Zoom Out” Technique: When you see a scary daily chart, zoom out to 5 years. Then 10 years. Then 20. From that perspective, every crash, correction, and crisis is a small blip on a relentlessly upward trajectory. The long-term view is the truth of equity investing. The daily view is the distortion.

9. The Bottom Line: Your Attention Is Worth More Than the Market’s Information

Here is the simplest way I can put it: your attention is a finite, valuable resource, and financial media is trying to steal it from you.

Every minute you spend watching BNN, scrolling through market takes on Twitter, or anxiety-checking your portfolio is a minute you could have spent on something that actually improves your life. Time with your family. Building your career. Learning a skill. Exercising. Literally anything else.

The entire thesis of XEQT is that you can capture the long-term growth of the global economy without doing any work. The strategy only fails when you intervene – when you sell at the wrong time, when you panic, when you try to outsmart a system that is already doing the work for you.

The financial media diet is not about being uninformed. It is about being strategically informed – knowing what actually matters and ruthlessly filtering out everything that does not. For an XEQT investor, that filter removes about 99% of financial media. And that 99% was never helping you anyway. It was just keeping you anxious, engaged, and one push notification away from a decision that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime.

Turn off the notifications. Delete the apps. Check quarterly. Automate your contributions. And go live your life. Your XEQT portfolio will be fine without you watching it.

Related Reading

• What Is XEQT? A Comprehensive Guide
• FOMO, Fear, and XEQT: How to Invest When Markets Feel Scary
• How to Stop Checking Your XEQT Portfolio Every Day
• How Social Media Is Ruining Your Investment Strategy
• Loss Aversion and XEQT: Why Losing $1,000 Hurts More Than Gaining $2,000
• XEQT’s Geographic Diversification: Why Your Money Spans 49 Countries
• XEQT Automatic Rebalancing Explained

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. XEQT is an equity ETF and carries market risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The market return figures cited are approximate and based on historical data. The referral link above may provide a bonus to both you and the author. Always do your own research and consider consulting a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.