As the daily predictions of the coming housing apocalypse grow increasingly strident there is some natural push back from the sell side of the industry who have adopted an equal but opposite position. As I said before I do have some sympathy from property investors because the price discovery in their markets is very poor…
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I am intrigued at the constant doom and gloom talk around the property market, not because I have any particular view on property since what I know about property could be written on a gnats arse with a six inch nail. However, I do know a lot about markets and systems and their natural ebbs…
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Bored with the usual headline of the looming war with China, North Korea, Russia and the Packenham Upper Under 12B’s the Murdoch press has now turned its hyperbolic panic based radar onto the housing market. Apparently that house you bought last year for $3M is now worth one ugly camel, a distributor from a Datsun…
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At the end of a two-day investment conference sponsored by Dimensional Fund Advisors in Los Angeles last month, I couldn’t stop squirming. The final workshop included a slide show highlighting articles from major business publications across the country conveying a range of dire investment messages. Some spouted warnings of impending market calamity. Others urged investors…
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Abstract We examine all S&P 500 firms over 1999-2014 that publicly characterize their annual performance with extreme positive language. We find that only 18% of such firms increase shareholder value, while nearly 75% have insignificant performance, and the remaining 7% actually destroy shareholder value. Our evidence suggests that firms often base their positive claims on…
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The old aphorism of a picture paints a thousand words is like most sayings chronically overused but sometimes a simple graphic comes along that explains the future with remarkable clarity. The following chart is one such image. Source – Medium The fall in both jobs and oil rigs in 2015 was a function of the…
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WHEN HRISTOS DOUCOULIAGOS was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this is bordering on libel.’”…
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