The recent market activity and what we saw in September 08 and March 09 is why people should not listen to any ‘investment professional’ who tells you to invest based on how old you are. It’s ridiculous to apply the “average” growth rate of the market without considering where in the market cycle you are in. If you invested during any peak, you are almost guaranteed NEVER to see growth if your portfolio without a significant amount of dollar cost averaging just to get you back to even.
Here’s VanGuard’s model portfolio mix and my portfolio mix for my 401K. If my portfolio looked anything like their ‘model’ portfolio, I’d be, to put it meekly, royally screwed.
I’ve been in cash since the the 4Q of 2009 after being purely in individual stocks for most of the year (I was also completely in cash during 08-09 crash). Don’t get my wrong, I’m not advocating staying out of the market, but timing is important and my portfolio mix will look a bit more like the model mix when stocks become cheap, and hopefully irrationally cheap, again. Dow 8500 looks like a good place to start thinking about it. What do you think? Dow 8500 or Dow 11500 first?
We released a pretty cool trivia application, called the Dean’s List Trivia Game, which is available in the Android Market. I had a lot of fun working on this project, and a lot of help as well, and it came together pretty nicely when it was all said and done.
The crazy part about building this application is how it all started. My friend Russ and his family LOVE games. I think they have every game ever made, and I’m pretty sure we’ve played Monopoly using this rare spinner made for the United Kingdom version of the game during World War II. That may be the Sweet Tea Vodka speaking, but the point is the man loves his games.
One day, Russ comes over and he tells me about this guy he knows, Marty Dick, who sends him trivia questions every week and he puts me on the list. That Friday I get an email with 10 of the most interesting, challenging questions I’ve come across. I’m going through them, racking my brain, and when I get to the bottom there are no answers! WTF! Russ! You didn’t tell me that there aren’t any answers! Oddly enough, why I’m spewing this in an email to him, I get another message in my inbox reading “QUIZ ANSWERS – OPEN LAST.”
Who is this guy? In the presence of so much technology, is Marty really emailing questions, then sending a follow up email with answers? Really? Gaming has been propagating at an incredible pace through the advent of application platforms like Facebook, the iPhone, and Android so it was a bit strange that Marty was hosting this game using the snail mail of electronic communication. What’s up with that? Then, I found out who Marty was:
So Marty is in his 60s, retired, and lives somewhere in the Keys. Turns out he’s been creating these trivia questions for years, originally writing them down on index cards and handing them out to his friends to see how well they did. Index cards. He finally upgraded to electronic delivering them and continues to send out new questions every Friday to this day.
Russ and I thought that this would be a fantastic mobile app, and with Marty’s approval, we set off to build it. With the help of Parker English, who designed the user experience and interface, Jimmy Cahill, who created the bomb set of awards, and the hard work of C Rajesh and Chidhambaram from TechGaruda who did the bulk of the coding, we were able to release this on the Android Market today. Check out some of the screen shots here and download it if you love trivia. I’ve showed it to a few people and this is the response I generally get:
I’m sitting in 9th place, 67 whopping points behind the league leader after the first month of the baseball season. That’s pretty awful. The question is, do I have any hope? I decided to take a statistical approach to see if I should jump ship on my team, or try to hold through this miserable start.
The first thing I looked at was the historical monthly averages and standard deviations of the players on my team. When I did this, I got a pretty ugly picture for April, but some hope for the future.
The green represents the categories where my players are performing better than their historical averages, while the red …. well, you know. A lot of red on this chart … a lot. Should I be selling low right now?
The data is telling us that April 2010 was a uncharacteristically bad for my team when compared to typical months in their career. If statistics hold, I should expect a reasonable bounce back for nearly all my players for the rest of the year. I should hold out for a little bit longer before making any significant panic moves, but I will certainly be looking for improvements across the board. I’ll be keeping a close eye on riskier players like Ichiro (age) and Hamilton (injuries), and they will be the guys I’d look to move for a younger/healthier equal poor starting ’star.’
What have I done so far? I’ve moved Molina for the ‘no timeshare’ Miguel Olivio in Colorado, and I’ve gotten Lance Berkman back to take the spot of Curtis Granderson (who actually wasn’t that much of a drag on my team since I only play him against right-handers, check the splits for his career). If Rich Harden can put it together, Grienke get’s some offensive help, and Dave Duncan has really fixed Brad Penny, I might have a fighting shot.
Your turn. Who would you target right now in a trade, and who would you move off my team?
I’m not really sure how I feel about this. For a pretty powerful and inspiring song, I’m not sure it really needed a remake, especially since it seemed a little B+ in the star power department. I guess someone was compelled to do this and the earthquake in Haiti coupled with the 25th anniversary of the song seemed like a ‘natural fit.’ Leave it to modern musicians to sample for charity, very noble.
What I liked: Michael Jackson solos, seeing Busta Rhymes alive, Tony Bennett, the Indian guy wearing a kurta
What I hated: Wyclef squealing, Will I Am’s lyrical genius, auto-tuners (except Lil Wayne), Jamie Foxx doing a Ray Charles impression, Fergie, Lionel Richie’s “Wow”, standard message and data rates apply
What did you like/dislike about ‘We Are The World Part Deux’? Did you like the original version better? Is there anyone else that thinks that Bruce Springstein and Kenny Rogers would have won a fight with the auto-tuners in this version?
Here’s the original for those that like to compare and contrast and forgot how bad-ass The Boss was:
So you are unemployed, with no job prospects in sight and a healthy mortgage and family to worry about. You are not alone as a staggering 17% of Americans are currently out of work (sorry, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is a more realistic vision of the jobless rate, not the 10% that you are ‘reporting’ and will subsequently adjust a year from now when no one is paying attention). Here’s Mint.com’s spin on the real unemployment rate in America:
Now while many Americans are finding it hard to earn a wage, there is a strange thing going on with the employed folks at our country’s largest banks. They are getting bonuses, and not in a figurative sense of ‘hey, you have the bonus of keeping your job although your performance was a bit spotty abysmal over the past few years.’ No, they are paying themselves cold hard cash partly financed by the federal (read as American tax payer dollars) bank bail-out program. Now I understand that a few of these banks have begun to repay their financial debt to the country, but the ‘lifestyle debt’ of long-term unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, small business bankruptcies, and retirement saving losses that these banks helped create are nowhere close to being recovered. To turn a blind eye to anything beyond the reach of their balance sheets is just another example of the lack of fiscal and moral responsibility so prevalent in modern day banking.
In nearly any other industry, these poorly operated business would be purged in typical capitalist fashion during down business cycles; survival of the fittest, Darwinism in industry. The main reason these industry Dodos survived was because the government had to intervene and lend mega amounts of money to them. They were so big, and supported so many consumers and industries, that letting them fail would cause massive devastation to our economy (and the world’s economies). In fact, 15 of the top 21 recipients of bailout funds were banks or bank subsidiaries whose survival has been contingent purely on their size rather than their abilities to operate, a fact ignored when decisions were made to pay out bonuses this year.
Being “Too Big To Fail” creates an imbalanced risk/reward structure because it allows banks to engage in short-term highly profitable businesses (CMOs, proprietary trading, hedge funds) with limited consideration for the additional risk (thanks to 3rd party capital rescue), which tends to be a long-term compounding problem that grows unfettered over many years. It essentially allows them to share the risks over a larger capital base (theirs plus the American tax payer) during crisis, yet distribute profits accumulated from their activity that leads to the crisis to themselves (through short-term incentive structures like year-end bonuses on annual financial performance).
So what can you do (and how can Mint.com help) so that this does not happen again? Well, it’s pretty simple, fire your (big) bank. Firing your bank is basically saying “I will not allow you to get so big that you can act irresponsibly because you are not worried about going bankrupt.” To do this, all you need to do is move your savings accounts to a smaller, more responsible bank. This exponentially reduces the size of a big bank, because your deposits are significantly leveraged in the modern day banking system (see the section called “Effects on Money Supply“). Moving $1,000 dollars out of your large bank could potentially reduce the bank’s asset size by $9,000, so a lot if these jabs to shift the deposit base can amount to a staggering change.
Mint.com allows customers the opportunity to do this in their “Ways to Save” section. Mint could take this a step forward by giving higher visibility to responsible banks or discouraging consumers (think “Didn’t Screw the Economy” rating) from moving accounts to bailout banks. They could even flat out not allow irresponsible banks on their site, a move that would certainly be damaging to new customer acquisition for these banks. With information that is publicly available, along with the data they are collecting consumers relationships with banks, they could create a banking watchdog system that brings the same transparency to the banking industry as they have brought to personal finance. These types of ideas, although not necessarily beneficial in the short-term, could provide a larger pool of financially healthy individuals transacting in more stable and responsible banking industry.
So are you going to move your accounts to smaller, more responsible banks? Would you like to see companies like Mint impact the banking industry for the better? Chime in on the comments section if it suits you … or don’t. I’ll be checking in to see if you did or didn’t while QAing Jeff’s latest build of Wixity. Fun.
Hans Rosling shows you how to to make stats cool again. Visualization of data is a great learning tool, and creating ways to do this will be of great value to those with less mathematical sophistication than others.
The insights that Hans Rosling was able to illustrate in this presentation were pretty amazing as well, and definitely surprising to see how much the world has leveled in the past 40 years. Check it out:
I’ve been playing in a fantasy football league with the same group of guys for about ten years now, and like many others of you out there, I just can’t win. It seems like everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, from a missed extra point to the NFL reviewing game tape to change the marking of a fumble which causes enough yardage difference to drop you 1 point loss in a game against the other team going for the last playoff spot (didn’t happen to me, but did to another manager whose opponent called up the NFL offices posing as a reporter to question a Jonathan Stewart fumble last year … priceless).
Now if you are an astute fantasy football player, you know exactly what it takes for you to win a game. Even in the waning seconds of a game, I can come up with the most ridiculous real life football play that would pull my team out from the jaws of defeat and on to capturing an elusive Small Show* championship and the prestigious Portis Belt (and eventually making it rain like Pacman Jones).
My White Elephant
After years of perfecting this ability, I started to think about what would be the most desperate of desperation plays that would be needed by a single player on your team to overcome a seemingly insurmountable lead. At first I thought it was obvious, the 99 yard rushing/receiving touchdown from a running back/wide receiver/tight end. The field is only 100 yards and a touchdown is the most amount of points you can score on a single play. It’s the max on yardage and points on a single possible offensive play. Defenses usually aren’t rewarded for return yards, so the best you can hope for there is a sack, fumble recovery, touchdown.
Actually there is a way to top the 99 yard, 1 TD effort, and this play is one of the rarest you’ll ever see. It is a legitimate football play for the quarterback to throw a pass, have it deflected by a defender, and then catch the deflection and run with it (Brett Farve’s first completion was to himself). This counts as both passing AND receiving stats making it possible for a quarterback to throw and receive a 99 yard touchdown pass on the same play for 26.2 points of fantasy legacy. Here’s a breakdown of the most possible points by position for a typical points-per-reception fantasy football league:
Theoretically, any offensive player can do this (i.e., Ronnie Brown Ricky Williams in the Wildcat), but for practical purposes, we’ll expect the quarterback to be handling the ball at the end of the game. So if your QB is backed up to his 1-yard line with 4 seconds left in the game and you are down 26, keep the faith, you still have a shot!
Here’s that Brett Favre completion to himself:
*The Small Show is the fantasy league that I play in. I’m currently 4 and 7 and up by 5 points this week with Pierre Thomas (my guy) going against Tom Brady and John Carney (his guys) tonight. If I win this week and next week I have an outside chance of getting into the play-offs provided another team loses and I can outscore him in Total Points. What do you think my chances are in both tonight’s game and the playoffs?
I’ve been a die hard Giants fan for as long as I can remember, and although I was technically alive and barely remember parts of the 86 season (and nothing from that Super Bowl), the 90 Super Bowl team made me love the G-Men . They had me at Mark Ingram’s 3rd and 13 conversion.
Bill Belichick was the Giants’ defensive coordinator in that Super Bowl and designed a genius defensive game plan, predicated on the statistics of his defensive unit. Knowing that Jim Kelly and the Buffalo Bills could rip apart the Giants’ secondary, he had his defensive linemen and linebackers give up yards on 1st and 2nd down. He believed that this would dictate that Buffalo would run the ball, rather than pass in longer 3rd down situations, a place where the Giants were statistically strong in all season.
His gutsy calls are not relegated to just defense. The 07 Patriots’ offense was a great example of not playing into defenses strengths (case in point, going to five WR sets against the top ranked Minnesota run defense), and taking gratuitous unsportsmanlike advantages of your strengths when the game was well out of hand. Gratefully honor prevailed and the Giants laid the smack-down on the Patriots to win their 3rd Super Bowl and squash a rather presumptuous book before it made its way onto bookshelves.
Last night’s Patriots Colts game is just another way Bill Belichick makes football analysts (like Mike Francesca) and arm-chair quarterbacks look like idiots. It was absolutely the right move to go for it on 4th and 2 and the odds were completely in his favor, as described on “Advanced NFL Stats:”
“With 2:00 left and the Colts with only one timeout, a successful conversion wins the game for all practical purposes. A 4th and 2 conversion would be successful 60% of the time. Historically, in a situation with 2:00 left and needing a TD to either win or tie, teams get the TD 53% of the time from that field position. The total WP for the 4th down conversion attempt would therefore be:
(0.60 * 1) + (0.40 * (1-0.53)) = 0.79 WP
A punt from the 28 typically nets 38 yards, starting the Colts at their own 34. Teams historically get the TD 30% of the time in that situation. So the punt gives the Pats about a 0.70 WP.
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount.”
It didn’t work out for Bill last night, but the decision was sound, and in the long run, he’s going to come out on top more often than not. It’s why he’s a great NFL coach, and we shouldn’t be convinced that our “conventional” wisdom is better than his statistical prowess. Just be content knowing that he’s a prick and move on.
This is just unbelievable. The sync between music and math is undeniable. It’s shocking to see an audience, a random group of individuals untrained in music, be able to use the power of the pentatonic scale.
Last week, I’ve started to learn Python through a peer-to-peer learning session set up through nextNY. The material that we’ve gone through has made learning programming very easy to wrap our heads around, and the environment of cooperative learning has been awesome. I’m looking forward to being a Python ninja* pretty soon.
With four and half chapters of Python at my disposal, I wanted to put my skills to the test. Since I’m a huge baseball fan, I thought I’d try my hand in simulating who would lose the World Series this year, a pillow-fight match-up between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies.
The first thing to do was to crunch the numbers. Crunching the numbers means exactly that, figuring out the probabilities of events occurring over a seven game series. I incorporated things like Ryan Howard’s immense strike-out rate, Derek Jeter’s incredible lack of range at shortstop, and Brad Lidge’s ninth inning ERA. I also made sure to incorporate correlations, or how related each variable is to each other. Funny enough, the highest correlation I found was between having a runner on first base with less that two outs in the seventh inning onwards and Arod weakly grounding into a double-play. Numbers never lie.
Now this got me a pretty good picture of who would lose the World Series, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the qualitative variables, the intangibles, the “Cole Hamels’ is a play-off pitcher” and the “Mariano is unhittable in the World Series” bullshit bullshit. These are usually the ’statistics’ that overzealous fans throw out (with no meaningful data except their distorted memories) as their defense to a player’s immortality.
The classic intangible lies on the shoulders’ of the Yankee captain, Derek Jeter, a ball player that seems to find himself at the right place at the right time in the postseason. Yankee fans have constantly spouted his ‘greatness’, and refuse to admit that he was horribly out of position on the Jeremy Giambi play at the plate, and doesn’t even register as having the highest batting average in a World Series (that designation goes to Billy Hatcher who hit a sickening .750 for the Reds in 1990 in 12 ABs). Heck, Jeter doesn’t even deserve the nickname “Mr. November” for his play in the 2001 World Series. He had 1 HR, 1 RBI, and 2 runs scored in November, numbers that were almost matched by a pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks (1 RBI and 2 runs scored). Oh, and that pitcher also won two potentially series ending games in two days that November with a 2.22 ERA, .96 WHIP, 8Ks in 8.1 innings. Derek Jeter, I’d like you to meet the real “Mr. November,” Randy Johnson.
Okay, so I wrote my little Python program to capture all of this. The stats, the pseudo-stats, the Phillie Phanatic’s rants, and the countless times we’ll hear “26 World Series rings.” With so many probabilities and interactions, this program chugged along for two days, and finally, yesterday before the first pitch, I got the result: Value Error: Let’s Go Mets.
*Looking forward to the day when ninja is not used in start-up world employment searches and reverts back to its original awesomeness of stealthy nighttime assassin.
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