Painting By Numbers: An Ode To Quant
August 21, 2006
What can baseball, wine pricing, medical diagnosis, university admissions and criminal recidivism teach us about the markets? My good friend James Montier thinks there is a lesson to be learned and explains it in his Global Equity Strategy newsletter.
James is the Director of Global Strategy at Dresdner Kleinwort Watterstein, a London and Frankfurt based investment bank. He is also a prolific writer and author of the book Behavioral Finance - Insights into Irrational Minds and Markets.
In his article "Painting by Numbers: An Ode to Quant," James discusses the role of statistics and the value that it provides. He further discusses the psychological implications that investors face as a result of quantitative versus qualitative decision making. While this is not something our egos will like to read, I do believe that you will truly find this to be a thought-provoking piece.
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
subscribers@mauldineconomics.com
Painting By Numbers: An Ode To Quant
Don't worry dear reader, there will be no gratuitous use of poetry in this missive, despite the title - I promise. However, pause for a moment and consider what baseball, wine, medical diagnosis, university admissions, criminal recidivism and I might have in common.
The answer is that they all represent realms where simple statistical models have outperformed so-called experts. Long-time…