Monthly Archives: August 2012

Chart of the day, Apple vs Microsoft edition

So we went back and took the closing share price of AAPL and MSFT for every day since they went public, and plotted the market cap against the p/e ratio every day. … If you stop looking at individual points and start looking just at the general shapes of the charts, there’s a strong positive correlation on the Microsoft datapoints, and a strong negative correlation on the Apple ones. Continue reading

Posted in economics | Tagged | 28 Comments

When private-school tuition is tax-deductible

Scott Asen, a former trustee and head of the development committee at Groton, a posh private school, has a revealing op-ed in the NYT. He explains that at such schools, the tuition fees, high as they are, fall well short … Continue reading

Posted in economics | Tagged | 14 Comments

When bloggers go offline

Posted in economics | Tagged | 17 Comments

Man U’s weird share price

But as Matt Levine noted that afternoon, after the market closed, the underwriters were clearly supporting the stock at the IPO price of $14, and the volumes being transacted at that level were truly enormous: much bigger than the official greenshoe. … But then something very weird happened when the shares reopened on Monday August 13: after half an hour at $14 per share, they suddenly spiked; at one point that morning they were more than $15 per share. Continue reading

Posted in economics | Tagged | 5 Comments

$5,000-an-hour lawyers

David Lat has the numbers today on how much the top partners at Dewey & Leboeuf were making. At the top of the list are Berge Setrakian and Ralph Ferrara, both of whom made around $12.5 million in 2011. As … Continue reading

Posted in economics | 8 Comments

More data on 401(k) loans

In my post about Bob Litan and his estimates of 401(k) loan defaults, one of the key bits of weirdness was the way in which he decided that the total number of 401(k) loans outstanding had doubled since 2009. The … Continue reading

Posted in economics | 4 Comments

The secret to success in the arts

If you live in a world of fat tails rather than thin tails, and if you have, say, 1 million operators, then the lucky few get very lucky indeed, even if they don’t have any skill. … But given the sheer number of people they’re competing against, and given the fact that the number of breakout stars in each field is shrinking rather than growing, the fact is that just about everybody with massive success will have got there by sheer luck. Continue reading

Posted in economics | Tagged | 27 Comments

If the Reuters blogsite stays down…

poll by twiigs.com

Posted in Not economics | 15 Comments

Annals of dubious research, 401(k) loan-default edition

Bob Litan, formerly of the Kauffman Foundation and the Brookings Institution, has recently taken up a new job as director of research for Bloomberg Government, where he’s going to have to be transparent and impartial. But one of his last gigs before moving to Bloomberg — a paper on the subject of people borrowing money from their 401(k) accounts — was neither of those things.

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Posted in economics, statistics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments