The DIY Economist

Heads up for the personal portfolio - IPE was sold in favor of SDS (the double-weighed inverse version of S&P). This is obviously due to concerns with the current state of the market, which technicals claim broke below the trend line and fundamentals claim is weak due to the dollar, oil, sick financial companies, etc. Therefore, ...

A study done by Daniel E. Goldstein, [We Don't Quite Know What We are Talking About When We Talk About Volatility](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970480), show that humans beings, even financial professionals, habitually *underestimate* standard deviation when given absolute (mean) deviations, on an average of about 25%. [CXO Advisory](http://www.cxoadvisory.com/blog/external/blog11-15-07/) elaborates that: - Only 3 of 87 respondents provide the correct ...

Following up on the current Shanghai bubble-mania is an interesting study done by Eric Savitz at seekingalpha. It seems that as far as bubbles go -- well, investors simply don't have patience. One market's loss is another market's gain, or something like that: Chart of the shanghai stock bubble compared to previous bubbles in the US ...

I published a short piece of armchair economic research :) : [Click me!](http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/a-brief-investigation-into-the-log-periodicity-of-the-shanghai-se-from-april-2006/) Comments welcome.

So everybody knows that VMWare's blockbuster IPO has set its price at a stratospheric 83.83, a lofty 93.14 [times earnings](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=vmw). So while this might be clearly unsustainable and all that, the market only seemed to discover today that EMC actually holds an [86 percent stake in VMWare](http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/yourmoney/orl-leckey16sep16,0,3833612.story), which it must hold for at least five years. ...