statistics

  • No Statistic Will Help You Beat The Market 

    No Statistic Will Help You Beat The Market 

    There’s a statistic for everything, especially in investing. Writers and financial experts love to pick out minutiae from the markets and posit that they mean something BIG and EXPLOSIVE about the state of the economy — and now that you know it too, you have some sort of investing edge. (If you were paying attention…


  • What Those Cornell Pizza Studies Teach Us About Bad Science

    What Those Cornell Pizza Studies Teach Us About Bad Science

    Sloppy statistics and research misconduct are nothing new, but it’s rare to get a clear picture of exactly how questionable data gets turned into clicky headlines. We have that now with the latest reporting on Cornell food scientist Brian Wansink, and it’s worth taking a minute to look at what’s exactly so wrong about the…


  • How To Gauge The Trustworthiness Of Analyst Reports

    Scarcely a day passes when I don’t receive a report from some analyst or research organisation informing me of how a new product has saved a bunch of companies a massive sum of money, or how a product has been identified as a leader or innovator in their chosen market niche. But can we trust…