Signals and Noise in Observation

On signals and noise and observation, in Nicholas Carr's blog Roughtype:

" ... From Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s  ... book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, but I found this bit to be intriguing:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness.  ... "