CNBC spent two decades ranking which states are best for business. They compiled data. They crunched numbers. They published annual lists that business owners definitely didn't use to make a single relocation decision.
The network identified consistent winners and perennial losers across 20 years of rankings. Some states stayed at the top. Others stayed at the bottom. Retail traders saw these rankings and thought maybe this was the signal they'd been waiting for. It wasn't.
Here's what happened: absolutely nothing. No trader who read "Top States for Business 2015" beat the market in 2015. No investor who memorized the 2008 rankings retired early. The correlation between reading state business rankings and portfolio performance remains exactly zero, which is still higher than the average day trader's annual return.
The beautiful part is the consistency angle. CNBC wants you to believe that knowing which states performed well over 20 years gives you an edge. An edge at what? Buying municipal bonds? Moving your failing dropshipping company to North Carolina? The rankings told you Texas was business-friendly. You could have learned that by visiting a Buc-ee's.
Somewhere right now a guy named Brett is pulling up this 20-year analysis on his phone. He's highlighting passages. He's texting screenshots to his investing group chat. He's saying this changes everything about his strategy. His strategy is buying SPY calls every Monday and watching them expire worthless every Friday. The state rankings will not fix this.
CNBC published 20 years of data about economic climates, tax structures, and workforce quality. They created a gorgeous archive of information that has never once helped someone pick a stock. But it fills airtime between Cramer segments, so really, everyone wins except the people who thought geography was the missing piece of their technical analysis.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
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