The Source of Truth:
Can a Liar Ever Be a Source of Truth?
I have been asking an uncomfortable question for most of my fifty-nine-year career in global financial markets: where do people actually go to find the truth? Not what they say they do. Not where they should go. Where do they actually go — and what happens to their money, their opinions, and their judgment when they get there?
The answer I keep arriving at is a disturbing one. For the vast majority of people, in markets and in life, the source of truth is not facts. It is not data. It is not rigorous analysis, independent inquiry, or the hard, slow work of evidence. The source of truth is whoever controls the narrative — and that control almost always rests in the hands of a very small number of people who have an enormous personal interest in what you believe.
That realization is the engine behind this entire book. And it is why, after decades of watching investors, voters, consumers, and citizens be systematically misled, I built INSTAT — a system that strips away every layer of human narrative and goes directly to the one source of truth that cannot be easily manipulated: the price that real money is paying in real time, across over thirty stock markets worldwide.
But before I explain why I was driven to that conclusion, let me take you through the landscape of so-called "truth" as it exists today. Because once you see it clearly, you cannot unsee it.
Can a Liar Ever Be a Source of Truth?
Let us start with the most basic question, the one that seems almost too obvious to ask: can a known liar be a source of truth?
You would think the answer is self-evidently no. And yet, in the America of 2025, we watched a voting majority return to the presidency a man whom professional fact-checkers had documented making thousands of false or misleading statements during his first term. The voters knew this. They did not dispute it in any serious way. They returned him anyway.
I am not making a partisan point here. I am making a far more troubling observation about human nature and the nature of truth in a financialized world. The voters were not confused. They were not deceived. They made a calculated, rational decision: they preferred the policy outcomes this man claimed he would deliver over the truth of his character. They decided that in matters of self-interest, the source of truth is not whether someone is honest — it is whether they will deliver what you want.
And that, in a sentence, is the crisis at the heart of this book. We do not live in a world that is searching for truth. We live in a world that is searching for confirmation — confirmation of what we already believe, what serves our interests, and what supports the narrative we have already decided to adopt.
Truth Social is not a source of truth. It is a platform designed to manufacture and amplify a specific set of beliefs for a specific political constituency. X, formerly Twitter under its new ownership, has been similarly transformed from a public square into a curated ideological environment. When the owner of the platform is simultaneously one of the most powerful commercial actors in the world — with satellites orbiting the Earth, rockets launching for NASA, electric vehicles on the roads, and AI laboratories developing the next generation of technology — and also controls the primary public communication channel used by the political administration, we have left the realm of information and entered the realm of control.
Is the Corporate Media a Source of Truth?
The mainstream financial media fares no better under examination. I have watched the financial press for well over fifty years, and I can tell you with confidence that its primary function is not to inform investors. Its primary function is to sell advertising, generate clicks, and maintain access to the powerful sources who feed it the narrative of the day.
Consider what we know about the relationship between major media and the corporations they cover. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, once remarked that his most important acquisition may not have been any industrial asset — it was NBC, and with it, CNBC. Think about what that means. The most-watched financial news network in America was owned by one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world. The same network reporting on the market was owned by a company whose stock traded on that market.
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are owned by Rupert Murdoch. Bloomberg is the personal media empire of a former New York City mayor who ran for president. These are not neutral arbiters of financial fact. They are institutions shaped by the commercial, political, and reputational interests of their owners.
I am not saying that every journalist at these outlets is corrupt or dishonest. Many of them are talented and sincere. But the institutional architecture within which they work — the editors, the advertisers, the access relationships, the ownership interests — inevitably shapes what gets covered, how it gets framed, and what gets buried.
Is the Government a Source of Truth?
The institutions of government fare no better, and in some ways worse, because they carry the presumption of official authority.
The Federal Reserve System is the beating heart of American capitalism. Its mandate is to be independent of political influence — to make monetary decisions based on the data, not on the preferences of the administration in power. That independence is not just important. It is the foundational premise on which the credibility of the entire global financial system rests.
And yet, no serious observer believes that the Federal Reserve has ever been truly free from political pressure. During every administration I have observed, of both parties, the Fed has been subjected to intense and often successful pressure to align its policies with the political needs of the executive branch. The notion that monetary policy is purely technical and apolitical is one of the great comfortable fictions of American financial life.
Are Markets Themselves a Source of Truth?
I have always argued that securities markets, for all their distortions, come closer to truth than almost any other human institution. And I still believe that — with important qualifications.
The market for a seasoned, actively traded security represents the aggregated judgment of millions of participants with real money at stake. No one can sustain a position in a market indefinitely against the weight of evidence. Eventually, reality asserts itself. Eventually, a company that cannot generate earnings will see its price decline. Eventually, a currency managed by a government that is destroying its own balance sheet will weaken. The market has a reckoning function that almost nothing else in human affairs possesses.
But this truth comes with its own important caveats. IPO pricing is not a source of truth. It is a mechanism by which insiders and investment bankers extract maximum capital from the public before the market discovers the actual value of the asset. The price of a newly public company on its first day of trading tells you what Wall Street has managed to sell the story for. It tells you almost nothing about the underlying business.
Private equity valuations are not a source of truth. Jamie Dimon said as much in his 2025 annual shareholder letter — private equity marks are subjective, often self-serving, and bear little reliable relationship to what those assets would actually trade at in a liquid market. The pension funds and institutional investors who have allocated billions to private equity over the past decade are holding an enormous inventory of assets priced at what the managers say they are worth, not what anyone has actually paid for them.
Why I Built INSTAT
All of this led me, years ago, to a conclusion that I have never been willing to abandon: if you cannot trust the sources of truth that institutions provide, you must build your own.
The starting premise of INSTAT is this: price is truth. Not the only truth. Not truth without qualification or context. But price — the actual price that real money is paying for a real asset at a real moment in time, in a transparent market with actual transaction records — is the most honest signal available to an investor. It cannot be fabricated without capital. It cannot be sustained against the weight of contrary evidence indefinitely. It is the aggregated judgment of everyone who has put their money where their mouth is.
INSTAT aggregates technical signals across multiple timeframes — the ultra-short algorithmic timeframe, the medium-term swing trading timeframe, and the long-term institutional timeframe — across over thirty stock markets worldwide. It does not tell you what to think. It tells you what the combined weight of actual market behavior is signaling, stripped of narrative, stripped of media interpretation, stripped of political spin, stripped of the self-interested claims of management teams and investment bankers.
It is an awareness system, not a decision system. That distinction matters enormously. I am not trying to replace judgment with an algorithm. I am trying to give judgment a factual foundation that is resistant to manipulation. The decision is always yours, and it should always incorporate fundamental analysis, risk management, and your own assessment of the broader context. But INSTAT provides you with a starting point that no pundit, no government, no corporation, and no political administration can corrupt.
The Question You Must Answer
So let me end where I began. Where do you actually go to find the truth?
Not Truth Social. Not X. Not the Bezos Washington Post or the Murdoch Wall Street Journal. Not a SCOTUS that was engineered to a predetermined ideological outcome. Not a Federal Reserve whose independence has been compromised by six decades of political pressure. Not a management team on an earnings call whose bonuses depend on the story they tell. Not a private equity manager who marks his own book.
Go to the price. Understand its limitations. Understand that it can be gamed in the short term. Understand that it reflects narrative in the moment even as it trends toward reality over time. Build a system — as I did — to read that price signal across multiple timeframes and multiple markets, filtered through technical discipline, and supplemented by fundamental analysis done with your own eyes on the underlying data.
And then hold every other source of information — every politician, every pundit, every CEO, every central banker, every financial journalist — to the same standard of evidence you apply to a balance sheet. Ask who benefits from this narrative. Ask what incentive structure is producing this claim. Ask what the price action is saying versus what the words are saying.
If I have learned one thing in almost sixty years of global markets, it is this: the gap between what powerful people say and what the market prices ultimately reflect is where both the danger and the opportunity live. Navigate that gap with discipline, and you have a chance. Mistake the narrative for the truth, and you will pay for it — not in opinion polls, not in social media engagement, but in the one currency that admits no appeal: your own capital.
📖 Delusional Capitalism
This essay is excerpted from Bill Cara's forthcoming book, Delusional Capitalism: How We Learned to Mistake Narrative for Truth and Why Your Portfolio Depends on Seeing the Difference.
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