Tag Archives | Wall Street Journal
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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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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 [...]

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Played On The Street – Part 2

November 26, 2007

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 [...]

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Played On The Street

November 19, 2007

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, [...]

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Hedge Funds: Who’ll Take the Toxic Waste?

August 10, 2007

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 [...]