This paper examined the information content of financial columns. Since the stock market is informationally efficient, no investor can extract excess returns by blindly following the advice of financial column. However, the labor market for financial columnist is competitive, a surviving columnist should provide some positive services. This paper demonstrated that a surviving columnist can provide consistently superior service in the short run but not in the long run. We also showed that the surviving columnist's advice is better than tossing a fair coin. Hence an investor with his own prior information should benefit positively from the financial column.
