A pig or chicken can pick stocks better than these superidiots and their math models. These are the same idiots that put us into this economic mess and now they want us to view them as the supersmart guys who will get us out of it??
This is all about market manipulation for someone’s profit. It always was and it still is.
I cashed out an old 401K to pay off my car. I’ll take the 10% hit to get out of the market (yeah, I know long term blah blah blah and I still have 30 years to retirement) and not have the car payment. (Ex has been out of a job for 9 months now..child support still coming but for how long- and my company has been doing rolling lay-offs since last December.)
Ping for Later
You coulda knocked me down with a feather.
I have found auguring pigeon entrails my most accurate means of determining when to put extremely large sums of money into play. Like when I need a new pair of shoes.
My dwindling pigeon flock is getting more and more skittish when I enter the loft, though.
Has anyone thought of auguring, I mean really auguring, with bernanke?
EVERY mathematical model of a complex physical (or economic) system is an extreme simplification of the system that it purports to represent.
These models (generally) represent processes by continuous equations, and (generally) represent very large input data sets by averages, medians, or other data reduction techniques.
For instance, weather models divide the atmosphere and the surface into cells, both horizontal and vertical, and use a single (multi-dimensional) data point to represent each. This tends to eliminate many clouds, local heat islands on the ground, and other concentrated local phenomena that clearly have direct effects on real-system behavior.
Economic models - particularly the “ECON-101” macro models - virtually ignore the economic decisions made by individuals, EACH of which is based on the individual’s own utility for the specific exchange.
This last is a pet peeve of mine. I believe that we teach economics “upside-down.” Immersing students in this Keynesian “aggregationism” before introducing the economics of individual decisions perverts their thinking.
In many cases the individual data points - including the extreme values - are critical components of system behavior rather than discardable outliers that pollute the nice, clean, macro models.