Declines manufacture uncertainty, and uncertainty manufactures searching. The chain is direct and difficult to resist. When something owned is losing value for reasons that are unclear, looking for an explanation is close to reflexive. The reflex operates whether or not an explanation would change anything, and it operates most strongly on those with the least distance from the problem. Readership in these periods can multiply several times over. The growth comes predominantly from existing holders rather than from prospective buyers, which already suggests what the reading is for.
Supply changes over the same interval, and it changes in the opposite direction. Declines attract a large volume of explanatory content, because demand for explanations of a decline is both enormous and unambiguous, and that demand is visible to everyone producing content. The overwhelming majority of the material is produced after the fact. Its task is to supply a narrative for something that has already occurred, which is a different task from supplying a judgement that could have been used beforehand. Output of after-the-fact rationalisation reaches its annual peak here.
The moment of highest demand therefore lines up with the moment of lowest supply quality. That structure would be troublesome enough on its own, and the real difficulty comes afterwards. Reading during a drawdown is seldom undertaken in order to understand. Somebody whose holdings are falling searches mainly for one of two things: reassurance, or confirmation that selling would be a mistake. Both purposes distort how the available material gets filtered, and both operate below the level at which they would be noticed and corrected.
The resulting combination is unfavourable in every dimension at once. A reader in the most emotionally charged state available encounters the lowest-quality information of the year. They apply the most biased selection criteria they will use all year, and then make several of their most consequential decisions on that basis. Decision quality during declines is notoriously poor, and this is the main mechanism behind it. Intelligence and knowledge have very little bearing on any part of the sequence, which is why well-informed investors are not noticeably exempt.
One workable response is to move the research forward in time. A written record made during a calm period offers far more during a decline than anything newly available. It states why a holding was purchased and what would invalidate that reasoning. Its advantage lies in the conditions under which it was produced rather than in the quality of its contents. It was written by somebody with no position to defend and no discomfort to relieve, and that person is unavailable once the decline has begun.
A second response is to reduce information intake during declines instead of increasing it. The suggestion runs against instinct, since uncertainty naturally produces an appetite for more, and reducing intake feels like choosing to know less about something important. Most of what is currently available consists of after-the-fact rationalisation, and one's own filtering is operating at its least reliable. Additional intake under those two conditions mainly adds noise to a decision that was already difficult enough. Nothing arriving during the drawdown was written by anyone who knew how it would end.
The same pattern has a mirror image during advances, running the other way. Consumption falls when prices rise steadily, because nothing requires explaining and the holdings are not generating any discomfort. Research is easiest to conduct precisely when it is least needed and hardest to conduct precisely when it matters most. That dislocation is a permanent feature of the information environment, not a temporary condition that better habits will remove. The only available response is to schedule the work around it deliberately.