Links

The Economy and the Stock Market – O’Shaughnessy

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A number of sites/blogs have been updating their offering to a free/premium – congrats to the excellent CXO with their new launch.

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Kudos to Jeff Matthews for challenging this uninformed quote from Taleb on Buffet vs. Soros.  I mean, there are two books out on how Buffet trades including the upcoming Warren Buffett and the Art of Stock Arbitrage: Proven Strategies for Arbitrage and Other Special Investment Situations by none other than Mary Buffett.  (The other being Altucher’s Trade Like Warren Buffett.)

“I am not saying Buffett isn’t as good as Soros,” he said. “I am saying that the probability Soros’s returns come from randomness is much smaller because he did almost everything: he bought currencies, he sold currencies, he did arbitrages. He made a lot more decisions. Buffett followed a strategy to buy companies that had a certain earnings profile, and it worked for him. There is a lot more luck involved in this strategy.”

—Bloomberg Businessweek, September 25, 2010

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Probably three of the more amusing paragraphs I’ve read in awhile!  From BWeek

The “new normal” will be an environment where “future investment returns will be far lower than historical averages,” Gross added. “If bond investors believe that the resplendent and abundant capital gains of the past 25 years will be duplicated from yield levels of 2 to 3 percent — well, they just haven’t been to Japan, have they?”

Ken Fisher, the billionaire chief executive officer of Fisher Investments Inc., said today that the concept of a “new normal” is “idiotic,” pitting him against Gross and Pimco Chief Executive Mohamed El-Erian, who coined the term to describe a world of high unemployment, more regulation, and the shrinking importance of the U.S. in the global economy. Gross, the founder a Pimco, and El-Erian serve as co-chief investment officers.

“We are chimpanzees with no memory,” Fisher said at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Sydney. “The next 10 years are going to be just as good as the 1990s. The problems in this current environment we think are so different, and so new and so unique. It’s the same stupid old normal we’ve always had. We’ve got a great future.”

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Fall is in the air!