Equity markets constantly surprise me. It’s looking increasingly likely that the Eurozone will disintegrate – leading to potential bank failures, stagnant economic growth and increased unemployment – and the equity markets here in Europe are pretty much shrugging it off today. The FTSE100 is up over half-a-percent at pixel time.
There’s a great article here on estimating correlations and means when you have missing data in your datasets. It uses the Expectation Maximisation algorithm to calculate the missing values, and what is interesting is how much the implied correlation changes after applying EM.
Clinton Chee has posted a list of factors he thinks is important when analyzing Bio-Tech stocks. This list is summarized below:
The New York Times has a great interactive graphic on How the Giants of Finance Shrunk, then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis. It’s really interesting seeing how, if the Market Capitalization of each firm is represented as an area, the each firm shrinks massively during the financial crisis, and now how the firms are rebounding.
A post over at the New York Times is arguing that one of the main causes of the financial crisis was inadequate quantitative models – models that tended to understate risk because they failed to provide a realistic model of the way the world works – neither incorporating risks such as a failure of liquidity, [...]