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Recommended reading, economic debates, predictions and opinions.
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Gus
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Post by Gus »

More from poacher-turned-gamekeeper Henry Blodget:

History is Bunk

He provides a link to some IFA charts, of which I found this one especially interesting:

Image

No doubt this mostly reflects the reversal in fortunes as the tech boom turned to bust.

Still, sometimes, past performance can predict future performance...
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Post by Bylo Selhi »

This black swan spotted on amazon.com. Maybe "Worth reading" [soon (~mid-April), barring any highly improbable events, of course].

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
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Post by FinEcon »

This one is definitely worth reading IMO, particularly if you liked Fooled by Randomness. You can check out several chapters at his website (in pdf format) 'The Luddic Fallcay' near the top. Unfortunately, in typical Taleb fashion his webpage is an unorganized jumble of links and one must sort through it to find the chapters.

I have read several of the chapters and placed it on my Amazon account to be shipped as soon as it came in.
Bylo Selhi wrote:This black swan spotted on amazon.com. Maybe "Worth reading" [soon (~mid-April), barring any highly improbable events, of course].

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
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Post by Bylo Selhi »

FinEcon wrote:Unfortunately, in typical Taleb fashion his webpage is an unorganized jumble of links
Also in typical Taleb fashion, this admonition on his website:
[Please, please, do not send me the list of typos in my drafts. Also please refrain from offering to “improve” my web site]
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Post by WishingWealth »

A standard Asset Management Firm outlook.
A few of their newsletters are interesting. Ended up there after some googling - or some other FWF link.
Last October, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that
58% of those surveyed believed corruption in Washington, DC
was “widespread.”We would joke that the number seems small,
except that business people do not fare much better in the eyes
of the American people. Gallup’s December 2006 poll on honesty
and ethics in professions ranks business executives, stockbrokers,
Senators, and Congressmen near the bottom of
respondents’ rankings of ethical standards, just above adv...

Appearances of Impropriety

http://www.wcam.com/index.php?id=82
(West Coast Asset Management)

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Post by Bylo Selhi »

10 ways not to sabotage your financial well being
Have you ever wondered why doing the right thing or behaving as we 'should' is usually the most difficult choice? Especially when it comes to handling our finances, there is almost always a less emotionally challenging path than the one that is 'in our own long-term best interest.'... As it turns out, there is actually a scientific explanation for such behavior. Blame it on old (psychological) wiring and the fact that, 'at least from a scientific perspective,' we are really not as modern or 'evolved' as we may think we are.
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Post by Bylo Selhi »

How Good People Make Bad Investments
Investing isn't hard work. And that's just one of the problems. For many folks, managing money is an exercise in frustration. We summon the skills that work so well in the rest of our lives, apply them to the financial markets -- and end up with lackluster results. Here are just some of the qualities that help us at home and at the office, but leave us flailing around in the stock and bond markets.
• We Stay Busy
• We Work Hard
• We're Optimistic
• We Look to the Past
• We Buy Quality
• We Play to Win
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Post by brian3 »

An article discusses the views of Niall Ferguson who is a pre eminent historian with very sharp views about their relevence in today's geopolitical circumstances. In particular he sees many parallels to the period immediately before the 1914 - 18 war,
Wake-Up Call
By ANDREW BARY

AT AGE 42, NIALL FERGUSON HAS BECOME one of the world's most famous and provocative historians, with high-profile posts ranging from Harvard to Oxford to Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
<Snip>
FERGUSON IS FASCINATED by what he calls the "paradox of diminishing risk in an apparently dangerous world." By that, he means ebullient global stock markets and record-tight yield spreads between risk-free U.S. Treasuries and junk bonds and emerging-market debt. He also cites declining volatility in stock, bond and foreign-exchange markets, and an abiding faith in the ability of the Federal Reserve and other central banks to rescue the investment community from any potential financial crisis. Although the global stock-market selloff two weeks ago wasn't spurred by geopolitical events, it validated his concern that investors have willingly downplayed risk.
<Snip>
Geopolitical risk is a vexing problem for professional investors. While they might recognize the dangers, they can lose their jobs if they are excessively defensive and hold too much cash in a rising market.

Ferguson acknowledges this. "If we all get caught in a 1914-style crisis, we all go down together and nobody will underperform the benchmark," he says. "But if I become pessimistic too early and I'm wrong, I definitely will underperform. Therefore it's better to consign a major geopolitical crisis to the realm of uncertainty, and treat it like the risk of an asteroid hitting the earth. Common sense tells us that a major war is much more likely than an asteroid, or indeed the melting of the polar ice caps. But there are incentives for investors and financial professionals to ignore the risk of crises."
<Snip>
Ferguson concedes it's hard to assemble an investment portfolio to withstand geopolitical shocks, although holding some cash would be a good start. He worries that the standard recommendation, domestic and foreign stocks, as well as bonds, "no longer provides adequate protection. In an extreme scenario, most securities may sell off. Mainstream asset classes have become more correlated in recent years."
<Snip>
Thus, he says, there may be a case for adopting "the old Rothschild principle": a third in securities, a third in real estate and a third in art. "But I'd go further than that," he says. "I'd want some exposure to commodities, but I would no longer privilege gold. If you're worried about a big war, buy missile manufacturers and sell investment banks." Ferguson, incidentally, has written a two-volume history of the great European banking family, drawing on thousands of documents from the Rothschild archives.
<Snip>
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB117 ... outset-box Subscription or purchase required.
He has authored many books including :
Colossus (2004), an examination of American empire,
and The War of the World (2006).
Should be worth a read.
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Post by Gus »

Image
Brad DeLong says that the NSA employment ratio is his favourite graph:

t shows, in one picture, the seasonal cycle, the business cycle, and the long-term trend in American labor force participation coming from demography and feminism.

The same plot of Canadian data - with the US numbers as a benchmark - tells that story and more:

* The amplitude of the Canadian seasonal cycle is twice that of the US. Small wonder that the popular X11 seasonal filter was developed by Statistics Canada.
* Technical change is steadily reducing the importance of the seasonal cycle: the 4-point swings of the 1970s have been cut in half. For example, construction is now a year-round activity here in Quebec City.
* The slowdown of the early 1990's was exceptionally severe, and we've only just recovered. This no doubt goes some way towards explaining why the mid-90's had such turbulent politics: it was no time to be running for re-election.


Source
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Post by WishingWealth »

For Wealthy Boomers, Die Broke may be a nice slogan but the reality will often be they'll Die Rich.

From a recent Scott Burns column.

RETIREES: HAVE A 'GOOD TIMES' FUND

Q: My husband and I have saved for 18 years. We now have a substantial retirement. He has been the primary earner; I have worked on and off part time. I have recently been ill with a potentially fatal disease and recovered, only to sustain a broken arm and nerve damage that rendered my dominant hand useless for about seven months. I am waiting for a settlement on that. He had a pre-stroke event last year.
So here is the dilemma: His habit is to save as much as possible, and I have gladly supported that fiscal behavior. But now I feel we need to spend money on ourselves and travel while we still can. He just can't agree with me, saying we need it for our retirement. I'm talking a few thousand for a Europe trip, or buying/renting a motor home and seeing the USA.
...
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Post by WishingWealth »

Make your assets sweat.
If I had a dollar for all the times I've heard this one, I'd be ...

Starving plants of the required cash for even basic maintenance is quite common in this day and age.
It takes an accident with a high toll (people and $$$) before we hear about it.

The plant managers in this kind of organizations are often absolute nobodies when compared to the HQ's CFO.
And if the plant mgr can't do the job within the reduced budgets, then one will be found with the right Nike attitude.

Company Deficiencies Blamed in 2005 Texas Explosion
(In the NYTimes)
HOUSTON, March 20 — An explosion and a fire that killed 15 contractors and injured 180 other workers at the giant BP oil refinery in Texas City two years ago was caused by company deficiencies “at all levels,” a federal safety panel reported on Tuesday.

Ending its investigation of the disaster, which sent 43,000 people fleeing to indoor shelters and resulted in more than $1.5 billion in financial losses, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board found that safety measures at the plant repeatedly fell victim to cost cutting — even after 23 accidental deaths at the plant in the 30 years before the explosion on March 23, 2005.

At a news conference, Carolyn W. Merritt, the safety board’s chairwoman and chief executive, called the accident avoidable and “the inevitable result of a series of actions by the company.”

“They cut costs that affected maintenance and safety,” Ms. Merritt said. “They ignored the implications of previous accidents that were red warning flags. There was a broken safety culture at BP.”

The Justice Department is conducting a separate criminal investigation, said a lawyer representing victims, who said he had shared information from nearly 7 million company documents and 150,000 pages of depositions with federal prosecutors and investigators.

...
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Post by Norbert Schlenker »

Nothing can protect people who want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Post by WishingWealth »

Count your blessings every day? Not if you want to be really happy.

The Science of Lasting Happiness in Scientific American.
...An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptation" comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline.

...
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Post by brucecohen »

WishingWealth wrote:Count your blessings every day? Not if you want to be really happy.

The Science of Lasting Happiness in Scientific American.
...An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptation" comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline.

...
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Um, shouldn't this be in the "finer things in life" subsection of the Philosophy of Blonde thread? :wink:
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Post by WishingWealth »

New BizMag just out.

http://www.portfolio.com/

Was WIP for two years.

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Post by ghariton »

Nicholas Taleb has a new book out, The Black Swan. I was leafing through it in Chapters (bless Heather), and it seems very much a rehash of his first book, which I would summarize (at the risk of being simplistic) as "There's a lot more randomness out there than you realize."

Unfortunately, I find Mr. Taleb to be even more pompous and arrogant this time out. Maybe it's just my dislike for his style, but it sets my teeth on edge. And he has the occasional unfortunate statement. An example at random, from page 239:
Standard deviations do not exist outside the Gaussian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Gaussian family (whi ch includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and the average) is sufficient to describe.
Three errors in one paragraph.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, go read Benoit Mandelbrot, or better yet, John Tukey.

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A great list of books with 2 free online books

Post by focused »

I haven't gone through the whole thread however I don't think it would hurt to (re) post this valuable list of books with references to two free online books:

"Serious Money" by Rick Ferri
http://www.portfoliosolutions.com/v2/ma ... riousmoney

and

"Investment Strategies for the 21st Century" by Frank Armstrong
http://www.investorsolutions.com/premie ... /index.cfm

An excerpt from the latter was quite eye opening:

"The conclusions were remarkable. Using market-index returns for the three asset classes, (S&P 500 for stocks, Shearson Lehman Government/Corporate Bond Index for bonds, and the 30-day Treasury Bill for cash) the team was able to explain 93.6 percent of a pension fund's performance based solely on knowing its investment policy! The biggest single factor explaining performance was simply the investment policy (asset allocation) decision that determined how much a fund should hold in stocks, bonds, or cash.

Image

That left less than 6 percent of the difference in results to all other causes! The other factors contributed to the differences in total return, but not necessarily in a positive way. Attempts at market timing almost always resulted in a reduction of return, and individual stock selection on average resulted in a reduction to the funds' returns. There was a wider variation in individual stock selection impact than in market timing, and a few managers were able to affect performance during the time period in a positive manner. Cost and execution differences for these very large investment plans were not an important factor (but you can believe they are a very important factor for you!)."

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The List!

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Post by Bylo Selhi »

Way back in Jun05 ghariton wrote:From the authors of Freakonomics, in today's New York Times...
An update with an insight that's even more valuable to some of the posters on this forum, 'Freakonomics' writer talks monkey business
He also devised two games that showed monkeys could end up feeling as if they'd won or lost, even though they'd actually broken even. Their seemingly irrational preference for the "winning" game had Chen questioning how useful the monkeys would be as a touchstone for studying human behavior. Then he found that a similar study of day traders conducted by another researcher resulted in the same psychological preference. Even when they came out even, the day traders irrationally preferred to feel they won, rather than lost money...
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Post by Wallace »

Greed and Corporate Failure - The lessons from recent disasters

This is my type of book, full of Shakespearian heroes with destructive fatal flaws, and well-meaning but gullible supporting actors. Reading about Barings, Enron, Worldcom, Marconi confirms my long-held belief that people in positions of power, if left unchecked, spiral totally out of control.

Stewart Hamilton, a professor of forensic accounting at IMD. Lausanne, Switzerland, argues that "fraud is rarely the underlying cause of a company's downfall. When it occurs, either the fraud was possible as a result of lax or non-existant controls, or it was deliberately perpetrated in order to cover up management failings."

He states that "The recurring themes are poor strategic decisions, overexpansion..... the greed, lust for power of CEOs and other 'star' performers, poor risk management and weak internal controls particularly in regards to cash, and ineffective boards and audit committees."

Perhaps I enjoyed this book because I'm a doctor, not an accountant. The fatal human failings of the characters who bring down the largest companies in the world are fascinating but fearsome. Yet this is the arena into which we throw our life savings. :shock:

Scary.
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Post by WishingWealth »

Was just reading We can see the causes of Cho's rampage now, so why not before?.
A review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" in Sunday Telegraph.

I meant to ask Georges a few days ago how the three 'so obvious' wrongs could have gone by the publisher's reviewers or Taleb's own people. I can imagine that he must be sending some copies for peer reviewing to people who can understand what he writes.
Niall Ferguson can be forgiven for not catching those pp 239 statements but if they are that obvious, a competent statistician would.*

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* I barely made Stats 101 so I read such books for the pictures. :lol:
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Post by parvus »

georges wrote:
Unfortunately, I find Mr. Taleb to be even more pompous and arrogant this time out
You're not alone.
Taleb ridicules distinguished economists while presenting himself as a lonely, persecuted genius. He declares that Harry M. Markowitz and William F. Sharpe, winners (with Merton H. Miller) of the 1990 Nobel Prize for theories of capital markets, sold “quack remedies” that “everyone in the business world” knew to be “fraud.” Taleb asserts that another Nobelist, Myron S. Scholes, flew into a “state of rage” on hearing his ideas, while a member of the French Academy of Sciences “blew a fuse ... right when I showed empirical evidence of the role of black swans in markets. He turned red with anger, had difficulty breathing and started hurling insults at me.”

Criticizing the accomplished is healthy; mocking them because they are accomplished is sophomoric.
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Post by ghariton »

Taleb's response to the critique in the NY Times.

I always wonder about authors who take themselves so seriously that they feel they have to rebut every criticism in detail.

I'm all in favour of Taleb's basic message. I just don't think it's very new. For example, John Tukey, one of the brightest people I ever met, spent a large part of his career arguing against blind use of the Gaussian distribution -- the expression "normal distribution" was banned from his classroom, because, he maintained, it was not "normal".

On the other hand, as John Tukey would agree, you don't just throw out the Gaussian model, as Taleb would seem to want to do. There are many situations where it is the most appropriate model. Even where it is not, you can use it to build more appropriate models. For example, as John showed back in 1960, a random process which is Gaussian, but which is contaminated by observations from another Gaussian with same mean but with a standard deviation three times as large as the original, will give you tales that are as fat as you want (i.e. really crank up the randomness). And the contamination doesn't have to be very large -- about 7% should do for the population variance to no longer be well defined, as I recall.

I personally can't stand Taleb's style. But if that style helps communicate the message to a wide audience, then good.

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Post by Brix »

ghariton wrote:Unfortunately, I find Mr. Taleb to be even more pompous and arrogant this time out. Maybe it's just my dislike for his style, but it sets my teeth on edge.

[...]

If you're interested in this kind of thing, go read Benoit Mandelbrot, or better yet, John Tukey.
It seems Tukey may stand alone, since Mandelbrot too can be taken as arrogant and pompous:
Benoit Mandelbrot: Annoyingly full of himself.

I’m currently reading Mandebrot’s “The misbehavior of markets” which in time I will write a review of, but about 100 pages in I have to say I’m pretty tired of him stating every couple of pages how he discovered fat tails in market prices forty years ago, and has known the whole time that Modern Portfolio Theory, Black-Scholes etc was based on the wrong assumption of a normal distribution all that time. There appears to be some interesting stuff in the book, and there is no doubt some of the basic assumptions of finance theory need a look at and possibly re-grounding, but its not like no one in the past forty years hasn’t been dealing with this.
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Post by parvus »

georges wrote:
I always wonder about authors who take themselves so seriously that they feel they have to rebut every criticism in detail.
Indeed. :roll:

Some of his rebuttals were spot on; others, well, diversions from the plot that a good editor would have reined in.
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