By John Richardson THE PICTURE on the left shows the Easter Day Parade in New York in 1900. As you can see, the parade is almost entirely made up of horse-drawn vehicles, bar the red-circled auto. In that year there was a horse manure crisis in the world’s major cities with the attendant problems of […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Lies, damned lies and data
“Excuse me, are you sure about that?” Source of Picture: bshort.org A wise man said to me recently: “All data is wrong; all you can do is make sure you are consistently wrong”. Now this is absolutely not meant to be any criticism whatsoever of what consultants or other market observers do for a living. […]
Market mind reading
Regular readers of my blog might have seen last week’s post linking through to the New Scientist article about research into new ways of assessing how markets behave. Prompted by the irrationally steep falls triggered by the credit crisis (or maybe they were reverse – the previous high valuations were based on irrationality, leading to […]
Crazy money breeds new thinking
This article from The New Scientist suggests we might have to develop a whole new way of asssesing what drives all commodity markets. Intuitively, everyone knows that the herd instinct matters. But to measure this mathematically, or statistically, seems a mountainous but fascinating challenge. At least it will keep the a few academics off the […]
Will free forecasting have its Wiki way?
Now, please be patient – the sting is in the tail. This could have great relevance to your business….. The industry in which I work – the media – has been decimated by the Internet with billions of dollars of earnings and hundreds of thousands of livelihoods sucked out of traditional publishing by online advertising. […]
The flawed “science” of forecasting
Maybe I’ve been to too many conferences this year, and indeed over the last decade, and have seen too many forecasts go wrong. Call me cynical, or plain wrong, but………..
Watch out for the Black Swans and dump the consultants
The former trader turned professor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his new book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable warns against the danger of forecasting. Forecasting is, obviously, always based on what he know and not what we don’t know. A Black Swan, by the way, is an earth-shattering event we didn’t predict […]
The flawed art of supply & demand forecasting
A guest blog – see Vanishing Post Boxes on this great blog by the authors of the book Freakonomics put me in mind of all those demand and supply forecasts that are invariably wrong. Yes, I know I’ve written about this ad nauseum – see my last article on this subject.But surely, there has to […]
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