- I hope Waterford didn't make too many of these ugly things.
- You Don't Know Slack
- Following up on yesterday's comments, I note that Jeff Matthews updated his Shareholder Letter You Should, But Won’t, Be Reading. The follow-up comments are worth a read:
Coke, P&G and many others that week and in weeks subsequent to the Crash of ’87 used the substantial cash on their balance sheets to take advantage of the market dislocations that caused even the good stocks to be sold with the bad, and cannily bought their own stock back at deep discounts to its inherent worth.
Why then, were there no share buy-backs announced yesterday?
Could it be that the Great Private Equity Cash Robbery of 2007, in which previously healthy companies either “cleared” their balance sheets of cash—to use the euphemism employed by Steve Odlund, the Chief Cash Clearer at Office Depot—by buying back their own stock at bull-market peaks or faced the prospect of having it cleared for them by the Private Equity Cash Robbers?
- Barry's piece about analysis using historical data on TheStreet.com this mornning is one of the best things I've read on the subject since Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness." In fact, Barry's article and the attached sidebar pretty much sum up in a nutshell most of the important lessons from that book.
- And while I'm (again!) mentioning Taleb, I found this very interesting. It fits neatly into the Talebian hypothesis that the world is a whole lot less predictable than we may think. While I enjoyed The Tipping Point
greatly, this article points out one of the major, major flaws in the whole thesis presented by that book. Specifically, Duncan Watts points out that the logic of The Tipping Point works well for explaining things with perfect hindsight, but is virtually useless for identifying what trends will develop or how to cause one. In short, he points out that the world is a lot more random than we think, and far likely to be driven by pure luck than various experts (in this case marketing and advertising people) want us to believe. Of course, the critics all benefit financially from our belief that things can be forecast and planned.
- Looks like skiing and a family trip to San Jose are on the schedule for next week. This week is all business meetings and work here at home.
-btc
