The Opinionated Bastard

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Technorati Tags: Iraq, puppy

The update is out, so its time to analyze the numbers from the Brookings Iraq Index report again. This is going to be especially interesting, because there was the election in mid-December. I did an analysis of the report in mid-December just prior to the election here just so I could compare the pre and post election periods now.

All previous analyses are here

Technorati Tags: Brookings, Iraq

Ron Surz does the second most interesting work in analyzing funds after myself and Marketocracy. Recently, he sent me this interesting write up of what the market did in 2005. Ron's stuff is really interesting because he calculates the odds of producing that portfolio by buying stocks at random vs. what you selected. We do a similar thing on Marketocracy for that matter, and I have some new stuff coming out in 2006 that will blow anyone away. Anyways, here's the PDF:

The interesting thing to me was how much the SP500 index has been lagging the broad market the last few years. I've noticed that myself.

Personally, I think the S&P500 is broken. I mean look, the S&P500 is supposed to be a proxy for the market as a whole, right? Now before we had computers, that made sense. And when the S&P500 came out, there weren't 7,000 stocks in the market, so looking at just the top 500 made sense. But now that we do have computers, why settle for a “proxy for the market” when you can have the “whole market” by investing in the Wilshire 5000 index?

Most of the S&P500 index investors are missing the point that all the efficient market guys used the S&P500 to replace the market because they didn't want to have to calculate a total market index. Well, Wilshire/Dow Jones has done that work now. In fact, I'm writing a paper on what Marketocracy is doing, and I'm going to have to use the W5000 instead of the S&P500 because the index has drifted so far away.

I think its time to fire Standard & Poors. In theory, Standard & Poors supposed to be adding value by doing the following:

1. They investigate the companies they choose in detail.
2. They try to keep the index balanced by sector.
3. They go in and “adjust” the market cap of the underlying companies to keep the index “realistic”. (Though strangely, that's not “float”. Basically, the weighting a company gets is “kindof” their market cap.)

Ok, fair enough. How did they do?

WorldCom, Enron, K-Mart. These were all S&P 500 stocks. In fact, because of the way the index works, it took S&P 2 weeks after each of those companies was downgraded by their bond rating division to pull them from the index.

That's investigating them in detail?

Perhaps a company so important to the financial industry shouldn't be owned by a book publishing house.

Anyways, the link to Ron's stuff is here:

He's not as opinionated as me, but you'll get facts about the market you won't get anywhere else.

Technorati Tags: investing, stocks, wallstreet

John Wixted sent me this as a comment to my last Brookings report analysis, I thought I'd share it with you all.

Basically:

2004: 10,000 Iraqi deaths

2005: 7,500 Iraqi deaths

So Iraq has improved year to year by that metric. 26% better!

Technorati Tags: Brookings, Iraq

Get it here

Basically, this is a clone of Kinkless.

It's missing a lot of features of Kinkless, and its buggy (save often). This is a very early release, its just barely useable.

But basically it does 3 things well:

1. The Projects/Next Actions are separate windows that update live.
2. Prioritization is built in, as is sorting by various criteria.
3. No syncing necessary.

I'm planning lots more features, but I've been trying to get it useable enough for me to replace Kinkless, since the whole AppleScript thing is starting to bug me. It's not quite there yet, because I use a lot of notes, and I haven't written that stuff yet. But its almost there:

Quick Tutorial:

Context View: This shows you your existing contexts. Click “Add” to make a new blank context, which then you can edit. You get started with 4, but you'll need more.

Projects View:

The Projects view is your basic hierarchical to-do list. Drag to rearrange items, the “New” button makes a new sibling, the “NewC” makes a new child.

1. Start the app.
2. Switch to the Projects window.
3. Double-click to edit the action name, etc.
4. Click New to make a new action.
5. Click NewC to make a new child Action.
6. Drag-Drop to rearrange.
7. Delete to delete, but SAVE FIRST. (Known Bug)

Actions View: Next Actions View shows you only the leaf nodes of the Projects view, or in GTD terms, “the next action”. They're sorted by Context initially, but you can change that. Type in the search field to limit things you see.

Archive View: This shows you completed items by date, which I use during my Weekly Review process. Eventually you'll be able to view this in a project hierarchy, but that's not working at the moment.

Technorati Tags: GTD, MacOSX

Quite a lot of improvements. It's basically good enough that I can use it now.

Latest version here

Docs are included describing the concepts which is sort of a gentle introduction to GTD, at least from the to-do list point of view.

Technorati Tags: GTD

You can get the latest here. It's now called “Execute”, since I wrote it so I could “execute better”.

Still crashes occasionally on adds/deletes, so save early and often.

Docs are updated with release notes.

For you upgraders:

• Open your previous file with the old one.

• Save it as XML.

• Now open with the new one.

In fact, ALWAYS SAVE AS XML. I found out the hard way that “binary” files don't upgrade across model changes. The SQL ones might, but why bother? XML is perfectly fine for this kind of thing.

Eventually this is moving away from my blog and over to www.twinforces.com, as soon as Sandvox will let me actually publish there. :-)

Technorati Tags: GTD, lifehacks, MacOSX