Tag Archives | equity
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Insider Trading: A Window On Our Economy

April 7, 2011

Insider trading is making more headlines than we have seen since Ivan Boesky was fitted with handcuffs back in 1986. This morning’s newspapers report the arrests of Matthew Kluger and Garrett Bauer, a lawyer-trader pair who have apparently been at it for seventeen years. A third party in the scheme is cooperating with authorities. Yesterday, [...]

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Stress Testing: A Reminder from Fukushima

March 17, 2011

The eyes of the world are on Fukushima, Japan, where heroic technicians and military personnel struggle to prevent a nuclear armageddon. A massive earthquake spawned a devastating tsunami that knocked out a nuclear power plant’s cooling system. And here we are. This reminds us how low-probability high-impact events tend to be correlated. If a country experiences prolonged draught, [...]

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Facebook and Goldman Sachs: What You Should Know

January 5, 2011

If you are one of the lucky few investors Goldman Sachs is offering pre-IPO shares of Facebook to, buy all you can afford! The deal will be squeaky clean, and you will make gobs of money. Goldman Sachs will do everything possible to ensure you do. How do I know? Let’s connect a few dots. [...]

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Not Your Parents’ Stock Market

August 22, 2010

After the 2000 tech bubble, followed by the broader market collapse in 2001-2002, it didn’t take long for individual Investors to return to the stock market. This time is different. The Investment Company Institute reports that Investors actually withdrew a whopping $33 billion from domestic equity mutual funds in the first seven months of this [...]

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Benford’s Law

December 10, 2007

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 [...]