Re: Why do people pick stocks?

Fred Foldvary wrote: Even indexes replace firms from time to time. The SP 500 has just been purged of foreign firms, which apparently means that scads of index funds will now follow suit - which strikes me as a bit silly. -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/

Re: Why do people pick stocks?

The SP 500 has just been purged of foreign firms, which apparently means that scads of index funds will now follow suit - which strikes me as a bit silly. Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/ Maybe not. Modern Portfolio Theory segregates a portfolio into various categories, and typically US

if coins were rare

If the 95% of the coins in the United States (i.e. 1c, 5c, 10c, 25c) were no longer in circulation, but bills were left alone, what would happen to the remaining coins? Would they go up in value? Could 3 quarters be worth the same as a $1 bill? Or will people still value coins by their face

Re: Why do people pick stocks?

William Dickens wrote: Discount brokers can really beat a .2% annual fee with no loads on either end? For sure. Most brokerage houses don't have any fees other than fees for trading. Even if you have a round-trip cost of $100 for $10,000 worth of stock (you can do much better than this -

Re: Index mutual funds

William Dickens wrote: Not that much. Assuming constant variance and correlation the variance fraction of the possible reduction you can get is inversely proportional to the number of stocks you hold (you get half the reduction relative to holding one stock by holding 2 90% by holding 10

Re: Silent Takeover

Kevin Carson wrote: I would argue that the rise of transnational corporations is a bad thing because they are products of state capitalism. Giant corporations, from the late 19th century on, have been statist institutions, and the plutocrats associated with them have been rent-seekers. Do

Re: if coins were rare

--- Gustavo Lacerda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If the 95% of the coins in the United States (i.e. 1c, 5c, 10c, 25c) were no longer in circulation, but bills were left alone, what would happen to the remaining coins? Would they go up in value? Since the US government would not do this on

Re: Index mutual funds

Bryan wrote: Right, but if you want to reduce the SD of your return, you've got to square those numbers - you need 100 stocks to get the SD down by 90%. And isn't that the measure of risk most people vaguely have in mind? Well what I suppose we should be using isn't either the SD or the Var,

Re: if coins were rare

Fred Foldvary wrote: . . . During the US Civil War, there was a shortage of coins, and postage stamps served as currency, and they could easily do so again. How big is the stamp supply, by the way? How much `float' does the USPS have? -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/

Re: Silent Takeover

Bryan Caplan wrote: A lot of regulations only kick in if you have more than 50 or 100 employees. Some explicitly kick out, though. I dimly remember one concerning visas, that said roughly If the HR department says the firm needs this alien employee, and the firm has N employees, we (the INS)

RE: Silent Takeover--IMO??

--- Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The chief failing of the mainstream antiglobalization movement is, IMO, they fail to recognize the extent that the global corporate economy rests on state intervention. What does IMO mean? -jsh __ Do You

Re: Index mutual funds

William Dickens wrote: Well what I suppose we should be using isn't either the SD or the Var, but the % of the maximum increase in utility that is possible with increasing diversification. Playing around with a few examples it looked to me that the gain in utility was inversely proportional