The SEC just announced that Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to settle charges of defrauding investors through sales of collateralized debt obligations. Not surprisingly, Goldman’s stock surged on the announcement. Can you believe this? What is more, the firm’s corporate and institutional clients have not abandoned it as the sordid findings of [...]
Benford’s Law is a fascinating theorem from statistics that states, for most forms of data, the leading digits of numbers are not uniformly distributed among 1 through 9. Instead, any given data point has a 30.1% probability of having a 1 as its leading digit. There is a 17.6% probability of the leading digit being [...]
Last week, I took the Wall Street Journal to task for publishing a “Heard on the Street” column that did little more than spread hedge fund industry hype. In that blog posting, I asked Journal staff to look into four questions related to the relevance and validity of the facts asserted in that column. On [...]
A free nation, not to mention free markets, depend on a free, independent press. How can voters make wise decisions—or investors allocate assets prudently—if the news they rely on is manipulated? Reporters struggle to inform their audiences, depending on sources for information while trying to avoid being played by those same sources. Day after day, [...]
Long before Mark Twain stood on Wall Street and saw it was a “street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other,” there has been financial manipulation and scams. During the Punic Wars against Carthage, businessmen offered to ship supplies to Rome’s army on condition the state insured their ships and [...]