Conservative Economic Commentary | Topic: Bernard Baruch

Post Modern Security Analysis

Moving beyond Standard & Poor’s

By John Schroy, on May 5th, 2009 |

Current publishers of financial statistics, like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, only deal with a tiny fraction of the useful data now freely available on the Internet. This article traces the historical development of 20th century financial publishers and suggests new sources and techniques available to Post Modern Security Analysts in the 21st century.

Semantic wikis, collaborative research, Capital Market Taxonomy, and free data collecting tools like Zotero are discussed.

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The Efficient Market Hypothesis

How an academic scribbler ate your pension

By John Schroy, on March 23rd, 2009 |

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The Crash of 2008 was exacerbated by a FASB mark-to-market rule that required financial institutions to write down assets below commonsense valuation. As John Maynard Keynes remarked, the problem was an academic scribbler’s unproven theory, some forty years ago.

That ’scribbler’ was Eugene Fama and his unproven idea was called “The Efficient Market Hypothesis”. The Crash of 2008 did much to discredit this harmful musing that supported Modern Portfolio Theory, mark-to-mark accounting, and unmanaged index funds.

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