Tom Brady Highlights Algorithm Deficiency

The NFL combine is rather interesting, because predicting outcomes based on Moneyball-type inputs is very alluring. For everyone excited by ...

Too Many Axioms?

I stumbled upon a website that listed 61 common behavioral biases ,  and most of them seemed good to know, unfortunately.  I guess there ar...

The Spin-Off Anomaly

The straightforward strategy of buying companies that have recently been spun off from their parent has generated very good results.  Here...

CitiBank Shows How to Play

Great anecdote on crony capitalism about Jack Lew, the latest Citi employee who will be in charge of a lot of financial regulation: As for ...

Health Care End Game Predictable

Ever notice how quickly the health care debate turns to insurance? It has long seemed to me that this is just a trick to advance redistribut...

Correlations in Down Markets Aren't That Different

Many people assert that correlations totally break down in down markets.  I created a bunch of portfolios from the Russell 2000 going back t...

Gold/SPY Ratio a Puzzler

If Gold and the stock market are both geometric brownian motion, what are the odds of this pattern? It looks like there's a clear trend ...

Interesting Gender Research

This is the kind of sociological research I find really interesting. Notre Dame Sociologist Elizabeth McClintock did some analysis of gender...

Why HFT is Not a Problem

Many people are concerned about the fact that some people can trade more frequently than they can due to having a large infrastructure of hi...

Olympics Drop Wrestling

OK, here's a conspiracy theory. In 2004 they added women's wrestling along side men's to bring down the brand.  I've been to...

The Easiest Way to Derive Black-Scholes

Black-Scholes is perhaps the most famous equation in finance.  It was originally derived by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes by using arbitr...

Al Gore, Sociologists, Address HFT

Al Gore's latest tome The Future w arns us that:   There are already several reckless practices that should be immediately stopped: th...

Gazzaniga on Preferences

Jonathan Haidt is now a popular speaker, having written two very good books (The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind), but his book...

Acadian Explains Their Paper

I spoke with Malcolm Baker of Acadian who was kind enough to explain what they meant in their latest SSRN low vol paper I mentioned yester...

Acadian Has New Low Vol Paper

Baker, Bradley, and Taliaferro (2013)  have a new paper out that tries decoct the essence of the low risk anomaly with reference to a vague ...

Local Paper Discovers Laffer Curve

My local paper is always for more government spending, and higher taxes on 'the rich.' Recently we voted in a Democrat governor and ...

Relative Status Preferences

Here's a South African on BloggingHeads.tv articulating the theme of my book The Missing Risk Premium , that relative status is a lot m...