GPT vs. bureaucracy; EMH fanatics lose the plot; Binyamin Netanyahu is not a victim here; a minimally prompted ChatGPT4 success; TED Talks enable Kathie Wood’s grifting; very briefly noted; &...
Well. I see that Krugman, in his column today, takes the same line that I did ... except that he thinks the confidence fairy is less plausible than I do. Not gonna lie, I'm feeling a little bit vindicated here, Brad. You were the one who came up with The Krugman Rule! :-)
ICYMI, there is a very nice essay by Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html) on the difference between interpersonal and social trust and the likelihood (fact?) that AI's will be designed to fool us into granting them interpersonal trust when they merit at best social trust. You could maybe even say that AI's have been created by grifters to execute cognitive denial of service attacks on the general public.
"What this shows us in simple terms is that even if we believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, certain factors would get us better results through long-term exposure rather than just sticking to market-cap-weighted index funds."
I used to believe that. Then I used one of those find-a-mutual-fund web sites to look for a fund that outperformed index funds over a long period of time and couldn't find one. (I was young then, so ten years was a long period of time.) I figured that, as an individual investor, I couldn't do better than someone with a financial background, all sorts of informational resources, and a full time job investing my money. What I discovered is that even someone with those advantages couldn't do better in the long term than an index fund.
You could argue that index funds just let S&P or Moody's or Dow Jones or someone like that do their stock picking. Well, that keeps the fund fees down. You could argue that index funds are so big that they make their own weather. A change in a stock index results in exiting stocks getting dumped and their price going down and entering stocks getting bought and their price going up. That sounds more like a plus than a minus.
There is a lot of push back against index funds these days. It's a bad look. It gives the impression that Wall Street is running out of suckers.
Until March 2022 tips was not so sure the Fed "had it." Since then, deviations have been small, but somewhat below target. Whether this means tail risk of recession (could actual inflation average much below target for 5 years without a recession or two?) or some technical flaw. I don't know.
Well. I see that Krugman, in his column today, takes the same line that I did ... except that he thinks the confidence fairy is less plausible than I do. Not gonna lie, I'm feeling a little bit vindicated here, Brad. You were the one who came up with The Krugman Rule! :-)
Foser: I'm not a fan, but if Hanania were the world's worst racist, that would be a pretty good world.
ICYMI, there is a very nice essay by Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html) on the difference between interpersonal and social trust and the likelihood (fact?) that AI's will be designed to fool us into granting them interpersonal trust when they merit at best social trust. You could maybe even say that AI's have been created by grifters to execute cognitive denial of service attacks on the general public.
"What this shows us in simple terms is that even if we believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, certain factors would get us better results through long-term exposure rather than just sticking to market-cap-weighted index funds."
I used to believe that. Then I used one of those find-a-mutual-fund web sites to look for a fund that outperformed index funds over a long period of time and couldn't find one. (I was young then, so ten years was a long period of time.) I figured that, as an individual investor, I couldn't do better than someone with a financial background, all sorts of informational resources, and a full time job investing my money. What I discovered is that even someone with those advantages couldn't do better in the long term than an index fund.
You could argue that index funds just let S&P or Moody's or Dow Jones or someone like that do their stock picking. Well, that keeps the fund fees down. You could argue that index funds are so big that they make their own weather. A change in a stock index results in exiting stocks getting dumped and their price going down and entering stocks getting bought and their price going up. That sounds more like a plus than a minus.
There is a lot of push back against index funds these days. It's a bad look. It gives the impression that Wall Street is running out of suckers.
Until March 2022 tips was not so sure the Fed "had it." Since then, deviations have been small, but somewhat below target. Whether this means tail risk of recession (could actual inflation average much below target for 5 years without a recession or two?) or some technical flaw. I don't know.