"There was a burst of unregistered shares of highly dubious companies marked to absurd valuations. As one bubble burst, a new fad took its place.... an ever more intoxicating speculative momentum."
1/ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Michael Lewis)
"Baseball was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and limits—of reason. It showed how an unscientific culture responds (or fails to respond) to the scientific method." (p. xiv)
2/ "A small group of undervalued professional players & executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises.
"How did one of the poorest teams, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?" (p. xi)
3/ "Hitting statistics were abundant & had, for James, the powers of language. They were, in his Teutonic coinage, 'imagenumbers.' Literary material. When you read them, they called to mind pictures. He wrote... 'To get 191 hits in a season demands (or seems to) a consistency...
3/ "Value, momentum & defensive/quality applied to US individual stocks has a t-stat of 10.8. Data mining would take nearly a trillion random trials to find this.
"Applying those factors (+carry) across markets and asset classes gets a t-stat of >14."
2/ "The model's four terms describe different life stages for an individual who marries during the sample period. The intercept reflects the average life satisfaction of individuals in the baseline period [all noncohabiting years that are at least one year before marriage]."
3/ " 'How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?' Responses are ranked on a scale from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied).
"We center life satisfaction scores around the annual mean of each population subsample in the original population."
1/ Short-sightedness, rates moves and a potential boost for value (Hanauer, Baltussen, Blitz, Schneider)
…
* Value spread remains wide
* Relationship between value and rates is not structural
* Extrapolative growth forecasts drive the value premium
… robeco.com/en-int/insight…
2/ "The valuation gap between cheap and expensive stocks remains extremely wide. This signals the potential for attractive returns going forward."
3/ "We observe a robust negative relationship between value returns and changes in the value spread.
"The intercept of ≈10% can be interpreted as a cleaner estimate of the value premium, given that it is purged of the time-varying effects of multiple expansions & compressions."