I recently talked to an investor named David who told me whenever he bought a stock, he felt like it was sure to go down. David is an educated, intelligent businessman who makes excellent decisions in other parts of his life. When it comes to stocks, he just never seems to do well.

"Where do you get your stock ideas?" I asked.

"I read several financial magazines and I watch CNN and Cramer and a few other news shows," he said.

And therein lies at least part of the problem. In this case, think of your brain as a processor that produces decisions. If most of the data you input into the processor is faulty, then the output will not be useful either. It's the same old "garbage in, garbage out" scenario.

The media wants you to watch their programs or buy their magazines. And they will lead with the most popular or provocative stories because that's what sells. But it may not benefit you as an investor.

One of the great things about naked strategies is that stock ideas are produced by an empirical process that identifies those likely to perform well. Selecting stocks this way is distinctly different from selecting stocks based on what you saw featured on CNBC or in Money magazine.

Even if you, against the advice of this blog, use your brain to pick stocks (instead of letting "rules" to pick your stocks, like naked strategies advises), you are far better off if you use a computer screen to identify high-performing equities than if you get your stock ideas from the television or financial tabloids. A computer screen gives you a list of possible alternatives that to some degree are already pre-qualified. Getting your list of stock candidates from watching television means your options will be randomly generated. My point: systematically identifying options is a better appoach to stock selection than randomly generating ideas.