What's It Like to Be a Financial Journalist? (With Dion Rabouin)

LIZ ANN SONDERS: I'm Liz Ann Sonders. 

KATHY JONES: And I'm Kathy Jones.

LIZ ANN: And this is On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week we analyze what's happening in the markets and discuss how it might affect your investments.

Well, hi, Kathy. It's April now, and we have another Fed meeting coming up at the end of the month. I also wanted to just mention that, as we record this, we're still in advance of the monthly jobs report, so we won't be chatting about it, but regardless, the Fed has been clearly in focus. So aside from that, what has been the story of the week in your world?

KATHY: I think it is about the uncertainty about the Fed, not that the Fed's done anything yet and we're all waiting to see what they might do, when they might do it, how fast they might do it. But at the end of the day, it's all a bit about how the Fed may react to the recent spate of somewhat stronger than expected economic data. And that roiled the fixed income markets. We've seen yields push back up—10-year yields back towards the highest levels we've seen in several months. Short-term yields sort of holding in this choppy range, waiting to see what we hear out of various Fed officials and, of course, what we see on those jobs reports. So it's been a busy, choppy week, I would say, with no clear direction, just a lot of fear building that perhaps, you know, we're starting to see a little bit more inflation, a little bit more economic growth than we're comfortable with, and that may change the reaction function at the Fed. Interestingly though, elsewhere in the world, we're seeing softer data and the potential for perhaps some of the other central banks moving faster to cut rates than the Fed. So that's another dynamic that's been rolling around the market here and keeping everybody kind of on their toes. What about you, Liz Ann? What's everyone talking about? And what do they think they should be looking at?

LIZ ANN: Well, the Fed is clearly in focus, and every day seems to be a moving target in terms of expectations of the start point and the number of cuts. We had some weakness this week creep into the market. I think it wasn't so much the change in expectations around the Fed, although the futures market showed the market moving to slightly less than three cuts expected. So that was a bit of a leapfrog, certainly, relative to where expectations were at the beginning of the year, but to your point, Kathy, about yields having bumped higher again, I don't know that I can pinpoint a specific threshold that starts to cause some angst for the equity market, but I think that was a main culprit of what we saw in terms of weakness. 

It's also interesting just to see the leadership shifts and the churn and rotation under the surface of the market. You know, an index like the NASDAQ is still up about 10% or so or close to it year-to-date as we're recording this, and you haven't had more than a 3% drawdown year-to-date for that index. But as a tell of that churn under the surface, the average member within the NASDAQ has had, on average, a 27% drawdown, and that's just this year. So you've had this churn and weakness and rotation happening under the surface, which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. It means that the market has broadened out a bit. You no longer have that extreme concentration by groups like the Magnificent Seven, which aren't really that magnificent anymore. That's been whittled down. Some are calling it the Super Six. It's more like the Fab Four or Five. So I think there's a lot of chatter about the changes in terms of leadership and what the drivers of those are.

KATHY: I think the really interesting thing is all the markets are trying to figure out what the Fed is thinking, and they keep talking to us about having not made up their minds yet. So no wonder we're in all in a bit of a state of confusion here trying to figure out the next direction.

So today I'm speaking with Dion Rabouin. He's a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Liz Ann, you and I both have been on his show, The Journal's Take on the Week. And I've known Dion for a very long time. You know, we are interviewed by journalists in the financial markets pretty much every day. So it's rare that we get to turn the tables like this and interview one of them.

Joining me now is Dion Rabouin. Dion is a multiplatform award-winning journalist writing about finance for The Wall Street Journal. He's interviewed sitting presidents from around the world as well as dozens of central bank governors and finance ministers. His work has appeared in financial publications, including CNBC, Reuters, Yahoo! Finance, and others, as well as on ESPN, The Hollywood Reporter, New York Times, Newsweek, The Root, Time, and Vox. So he's really been all over the media. And as I mentioned, in addition to writing articles, he hosts The Wall Street Journal's weekly podcast Take on the Week and produces Market Take videos, which you can see on the journal's YouTube channel. It's youtube.com/WSJ.

KATHY: Thanks, Dion for being here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I sort of thought I'd turn the tables today. Usually, I'm the one being interviewed by the journalists, and today you're a journalist, and I'm going to interview you.

And I want to interview you from the perspective of, I think, our listeners who are probably Wall Street Journal readers as well. And one of the questions I get all the time is "Where do you get your information? How do I sort through all of the different information about the economy, finance, markets? How do I pick through all this information?" And I thought it'd be great to interview you about this, because you have to do that. You get all this information. You have to synthesize it and put it together in the various forms of reporting that you do. So if you're open to that, Dion, I'm ready to hit you with a bunch of questions I think our listeners would have.

DION RABOUIN: I love it. I love it. Yeah, I'm ready for the grilling.

KATHY: OK. Let's start first, though, a little bit about how did you get into journalism? You do a lot of interesting work with short videos and your podcast, you know, articles. How did you actually get into this line of work?

DION: So let's, we'll start there, you know, hopefully your listeners will listen to Market Takes or listen to Take on the Week, the podcast, and Market Takes is the livestream we do. I also got a number of WSJ videos, so. I got into this—I think I knew I wanted to be a journalist probably back in high school. I think I still had delusional dreams of being a professional football player at that point, and really up through college, played for a couple years in college, and came to the realization that wasn't going to happen. 

And I think once I did that, it was pretty easy to say, "OK, I think I want to do this journalism thing." And that really came from, I went to a gathering of the Colorado Association of Black Journalists. I'm from Colorado. I grew up in Denver, and there was just this random invitation to go to this, you know, it was like a luncheon they were putting on, and my dad told me about it, and I was like, "Eh …," and he was like, "They got free pizza," and I was like, "Oh, all right, bet, I'm there. There's free pizza. I'll do it." And thankfully they did have free pizza, and I went, and I was just like, "Man, these people all seem to be really satisfied with what they're doing. It feels like what they're doing is important, and it actually makes a difference, you know, their job isn't monotonous. It doesn't seem like they are. … " I think my worst nightmare was having that 9 to 5 that was just like every day you wake up, you go to work, you do the same thing, you come home, you go to bed. And I was like, I knew that wasn't what I wanted. And it seemed like from what these people were telling me that their jobs were very much not that. And like I said, they had an opportunity to really make a difference and change things.

And from the perspective of how I got into financial journalism was I had been doing reporting on everything. I had written about sports, straight news, technology. I worked for a startup tech company for a little while. So I'd written about kind of everything that you can do. And I kept coming back to these questions. And I remember I was writing a story about the Atlanta Falcons new football stadium. This is back in, I want to say like 2012, 2013 or so.

And there was this point about how the city issued bonds to pay for the stadium, and I didn't know what that meant, so I go searching around the internet like what does this mean, and I couldn't find a good explanation, and I was like, "I feel like this is important this issuing bonds thing. I feel like that has a lot to do with the world that we live in and shaping how things get paid for, how things move, why they happen and how they happen, and I don't understand it at all." And I was like, "I want to start to understand that."

And so that kind of began the journey to where I am now.

KATHY: Well, that's probably one of the first times I've heard someone say they got into their job because of an interest in municipal bond issuance. I mean, you know, combined with pizza, I think that's fascinating. 

DION: Yeah. Pizza and munis, baby. That's why we're here.

KATHY: Wow, you know, it doesn't get much better than that from my perspective. So yeah, that's really funny. But it's true. I think a lot of people don't understand municipal financing is a huge part of their lives. I mean we look at all the infrastructure around us, and bonds built most of that. So good on you that you figured that was important. So you do your podcast. You do some short videos. How did you come to break out of just doing articles, written articles? Is this something that the paper encouraged you to do, or was it your idea?

DION: No, actually, the job here at the Journal was a hybrid video and text role. And we added the podcast about, what was it, back in September, I think, was when we finally debuted. I went and spoke with the head of audio here, Philana Patterson, and I was like, "I have this idea for a podcast." I had about five ideas for a podcast. She hated four of them, loved one of them. And this, you know, the one that we're doing now, Take on the Week, is the one she loved. So I will say, I mean, the Journal's been really great about giving me opportunities to do different things and to kind of be able to express different ideas through different media. So you know, podcasts, live videos, videos, text, graphics, all that good stuff. And the reason I started getting into it is because I'm an old-school print guy. I love writing an article and constructing and putting together all this information and presenting it to a reader in a big block of text. I love reading articles. I'm not much of a books guy, but I love, love reading newspaper articles, magazine articles. That's really what I think is kind of the highest form of writing, no disrespect to anybody who does any other kinds of writing, but I feel like that the ability to present information and to inform a reader about "Here's an important thing that's happening. Here's why this thing matters, and here's what you should take away from that" in the text format, you know, like 500, 1000 words, whatever it is, is just it takes a lot skill is a thing I learned as I've been doing this job. And not everyone does it well, but I really have just always loved text, but I realized that that wasn't where people were, that I could write this really well-reported, well-researched, well-edited story, and not a lot of people would read it. I would see the numbers in terms of, like, even some of the stories that got the most hits, the most clicks, the most views, and people would be on them for like 20 seconds. 

You know I try to squeeze in some Easter eggs and some good stuff, and it's like, "There's no way you got all the goodies that I tried to put in this for you in your 20 seconds of reading," right? And that was like the average for stories, and that's the average for most stories. Most people kind of come in, they read a story, they get the first couple paragraphs like "All right, cool, I got it, I'm out," and what I wanted to do was try to meet people where they were because I think a lot of journalists and a lot of people want to try to like force the audience to their preferred platform, and you got to meet people where they are. You've got to do the things that people want to see and the things that are interesting and exciting to people. And that was why I was like, "All right, well, let's do video." And I started trying to shift to video, I think, God, at this point, almost a decade ago, and just saying to my employer at the time, "We got to be doing more video." 

Thankfully, there was an opportunity through Facebook at the time to start doing some more videos, but they really weren't trying to do that. So I moved on to Yahoo! Finance, which had a big kind of video platform, and that was a big part of what they did. And then I realized, "OK, newsletters are really what's hitting people. You know, if you can be in someone's inbox, that's a way that you can really kind of capture their attention because they're inviting you in." It's kind of this really personal thing. So I moved over to Axios to do a newsletter. And then it was like, "Man, I feel like there is a lot of opportunity in this podcast space and really a way to interact and have a kind of connection with folks through podcasts." And so now that I'm at the Journal, I'm able to do all of those different things. And there are different things that fit with different forms of media. Like there are some things where I get an idea and I'm like, "Oh, this is for the podcast." And there are some things I get an idea, I'm like, "Oh, this needs to be a story. This needs to be a print article." And there are some things like, "Oh, this is a video." And so it was tough doing that at first, figuring out what was a video story and what was a print story. But now that I've done it, it's like, "OK, I hear the story, I see the numbers, the data, it's like, all right, this is for video." I can tell here's where we can put the graphics and the charts, and this will really blow people's minds. And this sort of other thing will be for text. This will be for podcast. And that's been a big part of my job that I really enjoyed.

KATHY: Well, that's great. So let's get into current topics since you're a financial journalist. What do you think the most interesting stories are right now in the economy, in the markets? What's getting everybody's attention right now?

DION: What's getting everybody's attention and what's getting my attention are sometimes different things. Since this is On Investing, and I'm being interviewed by Kathy Jones, I got to say, bonds. What's going on with the bond market, I think, is very interesting right now. And I'm going to have to get on the phone with Kathy here in a minute to be like, "Kathy, what do you make of this?" Because that's what I do. Kathy knows. She's laughing right now because she's like, "He does." 

KATHY: Yes.

DION: So I'm always interested in kind of talking through the bonds because I feel like that's the market where a lot of, I think, the smartest people are because I think it provides the most intricacies, and it provides the most like real tell about what's happening in the world. I started off in financial journalism covering currencies and eventually moved to Treasuries, and when you see those move, even, you know, and this is one of the things I do on my livestream is I'll say, "Hey, look at this move we saw in the bond market after this piece of data. That's telling us something. Here's what it is." 

And I always think that that's where people should start. It's like if you want to really understand what's happening in the world, what's happening with money, what's really going to move things in the future, it's what's happening with the bond market because everything kind of starts there, and then it kind of, I think, goes to other sectors of the market, and you can see it there. But I can't put my finger on what it is right now and where we are. And there seems to be a lot of uncertainty, whereas the stock market feels very certain that things are going to be really great. And you're seeing that with the VIX, the volatility index below 20 for God knows how long. You're seeing it with, you know, the I think it's … I don't even know what we're at right now, but I think we've hit 21 record highs in the S&P 500® so far this year. So there are a lot of asset classes, even oil, which hasn't gotten the play, has really just been kind of like moving straight up and to the right. And the bond market, there's very clearly a lot more uncertainty there. And I'm like, "What is that? What's going on?" So I don't know. That to me is the story of like, we haven't seen the bond market get in line with seemingly all the other markets and saying, "Things are great. We are very happy about everything happening right now." And I think that's the story of this inflation story that still isn't finished.

I think that's a story about some other things going on. But yeah, to me, that's the most interesting thing, and I think not a lot of people are focused on that. So I kind of answered your question the opposite of what you asked, but that's my answer.

KATHY: Well, you gave the right answer. The bond market is the most important market. So that's absolutely perfect. But I do think it's very interesting as I sit here right today, yeah, the stock market keeps climbing. Very optimistic about the outlook for earnings and economic growth, a broadening out, I think, of this expansion that we're having both domestically and globally. So you're seeing that with very low volatility in the VIX.

Actually, volatility in the MOVE Index for the bond market is quite low as well. So we have kind of brought down some of that uncertainty, and the credit spreads, like the stock market, very optimistic about the economy and things working out going forward. The problem is, I think for the bond market is, well, we have all this kind of really nice news, but we don't know what the Fed's going to do or when they're going to do it.

You know, that's a big issue. We also don't know, is inflation really under control? Is it going to stall out here? Is it going to go lower as the Fed predicts and hopes? Even the Fed's not sure about that. And so when you have the central bankers not sure, that bond market's going to be nervous. And I think that's where we are right now. It's kind of a real rosy picture in a lot of markets and in a lot of parts of the economy, and things are looking up, but there's always that sort of inflation/Fed fear that underlies the market and can undo the whole thing if things don't go well. And bond market people like to worry about things. 

DION: Yeah, they do.

KATHY: We're the glass-half-empty folks. So it's going to be reflected in that market. And of course, you know, interest rates are the basis of valuation in most financial assets. So it matters. It matters a lot. So you're really just really focused on what's going on in the markets, and that informs then how you do your reporting. How about your sources? Like, I'd be interested in how you find your sources. 

How do you know they're reliable sources, or that they even know what they're talking about, or that they're like the most brilliant people on the face of the planet? So how do you make those decisions?

DION: That's a great question from one of my most reliable sources, Kathy Jones. Kathy, how long have we been talking? I've been talking to you since, like, was it 2015? 

KATHY: Oh, at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been close to a decade, I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

DION: It changes as I've gone on. So I think when I first started talking to you, it was because someone in the Reuters newsroom where I was working recommended like, "Hey, you should talk to Kathy Jones." Or maybe like someone reached out and was like, "Hey." And so at that point, I think I was still just learning the game, and I, you know, I got on this call and Kathy said some smart things, and she said them in a way that made sense. As a young financial reporter, I didn't really know much. I didn't really understand a lot. And at that point, what I was doing a lot was writing down things people said and going to look them up later on, like later that night or the next day, and being like, "OK, what did this mean?" And then kind of going back to the conversation and piecing together what I'd actually heard so I could make sense of it. 

So once I actually got to the point where I was like, "OK, I actually kind of understand this. I know what people are saying. I know what calls they're making. I know what it is that they're making of the markets." Because there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of insider buzzwords and things that people say when you're doing finance. And it really has been for me cutting through all those terms because I feel like learning finance is kind of like learning another language. It's really like learning to speak Portuguese or something.

And it's like, "OK, well now I speak the language, so what are you actually saying?" And really breaking through and finding the best sources has been understanding, "OK, are you saying something that's actually an interesting and unique take, and is your take backed by data that I can see, or are you just talking?" And I tell young reporters this all the time. It's like once you get some expertise on your beat, you'll really be able to tell who's just kind of there talking and who really knows what they're saying is going to help take your reporting to another level.

And that's been one of the things that has really helped me grow as a reporter is being able to figure that out because I know who to call if I just need a quote real quick. Like, we've got the story together, and I need someone to just like say a thing, you know, or I'm putting together a story, and I need, you know, this particular kind of source, someone who's a CEO, or I need someone who is on the buy-side, who's an asset manager, or I need someone who's a researcher.

And then there's that third block, which is like, "I have this idea, and I want to know if this idea actually makes sense." Or I'm looking at this data, and I don't know what to make of it, and I want to have someone make some sense of it for me. And that's where folks like Kathy Jones come in, and Liz Ann Sonders, to be honest, come in where I'm like, "I don't know what to, why did this happen? You know, we're seeing bond yields jumping. Why is that? I didn't really see, you know, we got this data today, but that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense with the move we saw in markets. Let me call up Kathy Jones."

The thing that I found through that process was you can weed out the people who are actually in it, who are actually really have their own ideas, who are really curious about these sorts of things, and who are going to do the work of digging through the data to find it for themselves, and then they can explain it to you, and the people who are just kind of out there to give quotes.

It just comes with that process of having a lot of ideas. I have a lot of ideas, and I think, Kathy, I've called you a few times, and you've been like, "Nah, Dion, that's not it. I don't know what you're talking about, but that's not it, man." And I'm like, "All right, I'll bet, it's cool." And then I know, like, "OK, let me put that away, and we'll move on to the next idea." And then there are some people who I call, and they're like, "I don't know about that," but then it's like, "Actually, I think that's a pretty good idea. So it really has just been that process of talking to people over a long period of time, having a lot of kind of wild ideas, being talked off of those and, you know, coming to new ideas and, oh, "OK, that works." And, you know, also editors, like when you come to present your story to editors, and they're like, "What is this person saying?" And if I don't know, right, if we haven't had that conversation where I'm certain of exactly what you're saying, why you're saying it, and that you've got the data to back it up, well, then, you know, I don't have anything, and then I'm going to look bad, right?

So it's really just been a process of that.

KATHY: So if I'm an investor and somebody consuming financial media, so I can rely on you doing the work and digging things up and finding the information. I think the question a lot of people have though is, "OK, I've got this article. I've got this video. I've got this podcast. And it's talking about something. But I really need more context. I really need more information." What would you suggest a listener on this podcast or someone who listens to your Weekly Takes podcast? What do you think those people should do? I mean, obviously they don't have … it's not their job to dig this up and they can't just phone up anybody. "Jay Powell, I want you to explain that sentence you put in the last Fed statement." But how do you suggest they do it? Where do you suggest people go to get more information, more perspective, just more financial background.

DION: So you know, this is of course, the people who are already listening to WSJ's Take on the Week podcast and watching Market Takes livestream. That's what we're talking about, right? So for those people, I would say, some of the best advice I ever got early in my career was "go find the data." And going out and actually finding the data and looking at it, like, there was this book that got recommended to me, one of my first weeks I started at Reuters. It was called Secrets of Economic Indicators by Bernard Baumel.

And he actually is someone who's become one of my sources as well. Like this is one of the cool things about this job is you can find a book that kind of changes your life, and then you can call up the author and be like, "Hey, so let's, let's talk about the markets," and then they'll do it, which is incredible. But it really kind of just gives you a breakdown of like, "Here's what these indicators actually are." So I talk a good bit about like PMI reports, which are basically just kind of like business sentiment, how are things going for business?

But there's also the jobs data, there's CPI, consumer price index, all those sorts of reports. And you can go read through the media breakdowns of them. Even ours here at the Journal will tell you what the most important top headline numbers were, blah, blah. But when you actually read through that report, I find, and this is one of the things I try to do on my livestream, Market Takes, is actually break down, here's what that means. So it says that CPI rose 0.3% this month. That's important because it was point, you know, and I don't actually want to throw out numbers here, but just for example, hypothetically, you know, CPI is up more than expected. Here's why that matters. And here are the previous numbers. Here's the pattern. Let me show you, you know, it's been moving down, and here's why that matters, or it's been moving up, or it's moving sideways. And here's why that change of, you know, pattern, or here's why that is important. And when you can do that for yourself, because a lot of times those numbers come out, I don't want to read through, you know, even the Journal's coverage. I want to go read the report. That's the first place I go. And it took a while to build that. But once I started doing it, I found that it was so much more valuable because I was then having to, "OK, I read this. What does that mean?" And I got to go look that term up. And then, "Oh, OK, so that relates to this." And you start to put these things together for yourself. And then you go in and you read through some quotes that we've got, you know, we've talked to all these asset managers, and here's what they're saying. And you're like, "Oh, OK, that's why the reaction was this, and they took it this way, and this means that." And rather than relying on some newspaper reporter like myself to kind of connect the dots for you, you can connect your own dots. And then for, you know, a lot of the listeners here who are investors, then you can come up with your own investing thesis. Now you're not relying on someone else's, and you can listen to other people, and that can help.

You put that in the stew that you're making, but it's not, you know, you have your own ideas, and you're looking at the data for yourself. And being able to do that was one of the biggest things for me as a reporter.

KATHY: I would say, you know, it's not unlike how I first learned how to approach my job, right? "Go look up the data." I was a research assistant. My job was to, before it was as easy as it is now with Bloomberg to download all the data, I had to go dig it up in various places. And I think what I learned from that is the plethora of information that is available directly from the source. 

DION: Yeah.

KATHY: If you want to know about the CPI, just go on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and you will find reams and reams and reams of detail about how that is done. And pick up the phone and talk to somebody who works there, as they're really available, and say, "Explain this to me." 

DION: They are very available. Like this is another thing I learned. I actually went to, as part of this fellowship a few years back, I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census, and those guys, there's some lonely people there, and they love when someone just calls them and asks them about the data. Like, "Hey, explain this to me." And they'll be like, "Oh yes, I absolutely will do that." And like you can really do it. Their numbers are on the website, and like their email address. You can write them. You can call them, and they'll talk to you. They really will.

KATHY: Yeah, I learned that as a very young research assistant that I could phone up just about anybody. And they are lonely statisticians sitting there who love their jobs and really want to pour out all this information for you. So it's really helpful. I also have found the Fed websites have been really valuable too if you really want some thought pieces and information about the economy and about how money and banking works, all of the intricacies that people often build conspiracy theories around. I really wish they would just go directly to the source and see what's going on there. And yeah, you can reach people at the Fed, too. They'll be happy to talk to you. There's 12 regional Fed banks. They all have Ph.D. economists writing papers all the time.

If you can't sleep at night, just go on their websites and pull up some of the academic papers that tell you how they're thinking about things. So yeah, great source of information. So this has been a fun chat, but I do want to ask you, I won't ask you what you're focusing on now because I know that's such a trade secret, but can you tell me about a time when you were really surprised?

You started covering a story. You thought it might go one direction, and maybe it went a different direction? Something kind of unique maybe just around the financial crisis or you know was what was it that kind of, memorable for you in covering the markets?

DION: Man, I mean that happens pretty regularly that I have a thesis of like, "Here's what is happening." I'll see, you know, either it's the market moves in this way or something, you know, there's a piece of data, and I will think, "OK, this is a straightforward narrative, A, B, C, and you know, ram, jam, everybody goes home for dinner."

And I'll start making some calls, and people will say, "Oh no, have you looked at this data? What about this?" I'll give you an example. My latest video for the Journal was about why Wall Street is dumping streaming companies despite record viewers, and I initially went into that thinking, "OK, Wall Street, you know, these stocks are down. You're looking at Paramount, looking at Comcast, looking at Roku. These stocks are all just getting killed. It's because Wall Street is out on streaming. Streaming is about to die." And that was how I went into it. But then I start talking to people, and it's, "No, actually, we're seeing people spending more money on streaming. We're seeing actually the viewers rise in a way that looks like it could be sustainable." The big issue is, here, it's not certain that all of these companies are going to make it. Like I point out in the video, there's 12 to 20, depending on the size or scale you're talking about, different streaming companies that you can look at, and people right now, I think, just have too many choices, but streaming is where the audience is. Folks like streaming, especially here in the U.S., and there has been substantial, significant growth in that category and in that sector. The question is just "Who's going to be left there to really kind of take all the marbles" is what it seems like. It seems like there is still a growing pie, but maybe not a pie that is big enough for all of the current participants. So I went in thinking "OK, this will be an easy story, open and shut case," and what I found was, no, actually the numbers don't go with that. 

And if there's one thing you have to do as a journalist, you have to say, "OK, well, here's what the numbers say. Now I have to adjust my story to that. What is the story?" That involves making a lot more phone calls and looking at more data. It's annoying when that happens because it means you got to do more work. But that gets you to the real story of what's happening, and then you kind of can see things that maybe others don't, and then you've done your job. And that's really the most important thing.

KATHY: Well, it sounds like, Dion, there's a lot of parallels between what you do and what I do. I can't tell you how many times I started out with a thesis, went to gather all the information, and found out that the thesis was no good, and had to start all over again. But it actually can be the most interesting outcome, because then you have to start from scratch and rethink the whole thought process on what's going on. 

And of course, it's not just an article. It's the advice you're giving and how you're looking at things, but it keeps it interesting. And we all know one thing about the financial markets, they get quiet, but they're never boring. There's always something churning below the surface. So thank you so much for being on our podcast. It's just really great to turn the tables and find out maybe some tips from a journalist on how our investors can think about approaching getting the information that they need to be smart investors. So really appreciate it, and we'll be probably talking to you again pretty soon.

DION: That sounds great. And thank you for having me on. And thanks to you and Liz Ann for coming on my podcast. That was one of my favorite episodes. And it was really great getting the chance to talk to both of you on there. And, you know, appreciate you having me on today as well.

LIZ ANN: Well, that was wonderful, Kathy. He is such an interesting person to talk to and like you, it is always fun to get to turn the table on somebody and ask the questions instead of always having to answer them. So we talked about some current events, but in terms of the coming week, what is on your radar? What's important to watch?

KATHY: Well, we get oodles of economic data. I mean, once we get through the employment report, of course, everything's kind of secondary after that. But lots of economic data coming up, and it will give us, I think, a good reading on the direction of inflation from here. We'll be getting CPI numbers, which have become very important. And then down the road, we're going to get some more consumer information. And I know you watch the consumer very carefully.

But we really need to have a pulse on how strong that consumer spending is or isn't. So I'm going to be keeping an eye on all those data indicators. Outside of that, I've been paying a lot of attention to the energy market because we've had this big move up in crude oil and wondering what exactly the implications of that are going to be on the economy, on inflation, at least headline inflation, on the other hand, on consumer spending. So there's a lot going on right now, even though we should be approaching a quieter time. What about you, Liz Ann? What do you think people ought to bear in mind? I know tax deadline is almost here.

LIZ ANN: You had to just throw cold water on our otherwise fun conversation. Yeah, sorry everybody. I blame Kathy.

KATHY: Yeah, I'm just getting ready to do mine. So send mine off. So yes, it's top of mind for me.

LIZ ANN: Well, hopefully we don't have more depressing news with CPI and PPI coming up, but clearly the combination of those reports are sort of the one-two punch alongside the jobs data as it relates to, as we already talked about, the ever-changing perspective on what the Fed might do and when. Also, the NFIB data comes out next week. That's the National Federation of Independent Business. And not only is there an overall optimism index, which is a tell on small businesses, but they have lots of interesting subcomponents, including employment components, which is quite important because small businesses are still on net the largest job creators. So getting a sense of their perspective on employment. There's also a question that's asked about what your single most important problem is. And for a while earlier in the pandemic, it was the inability or the ability, I guess, depending on whether you call it a problem or an opportunity, to find skilled workers. 

But then maybe no surprise, starting in 2022, concerns about inflation were front and center. There have been times in the past where, uh, to your point about tax week, concerns about taxes and regulation have been front and center. It'll be interesting to see if that starts to move up, given, you know, election year uncertainty.

And then I also think, you know, we focus a lot on the monthly jobs releases for good reasons, but I also think the unemployment claims data bears watching, not just necessarily the initial claims reading that we first get every Thursday morning, but the four-week average and then continuing claims. And it's the differential between initial claims and continuing claims that sometimes gives insight as to whether it's taking folks a little bit longer to find jobs. And then I think the week ends with the University of Michigan data, which is consumer sentiment, some of the subcomponents of that, as well as inflation expectations. So that's what's on my radar.

KATHY: Thanks for listening. That's it for us this week, but you can always catch us on social media. I'm @KathyJones—that's Kathy with a K, on X, formerly known as Twitter—and LinkedIn.

LIZ ANN: And I'm @LizAnn Sonders on X and LinkedIn. Particularly on X, make sure you're following the actual @LizAnn Sonders. Me, I continue to have a rash of imposters. But also, as it relates to this podcast, be sure to follow us for free in your favorite podcast app. And if you've enjoyed this episode, tell a friend about the show or leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.

KATHY: Next week on the show, we've got a monetary policy expert joining us. David Beckworth is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and he's a former Treasury Department economist. So he should have a very interesting perspective on this unique economic cycle.

LIZ ANN: For important disclosures, see the show notes or schwab.com/OnInvesting, where you can also find the transcript.