What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
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I previously posted on a way to make a turkey that would leave you with the bulk of the bird's uncooked skeleton, and I promised some tips for how to make good stock.
Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same mistake, causing them to lose vast sums of money over the long term.
tags: christmas stocking, online quiz
When it comes to stocks, ticker symbols seem to be extremely important. Instead of evaluating a company's financial fundamentals, investors get seduced by cute abbreviations. As the WSJ notes:
Lovely image. You just made me wonder - as I am sitting 10" underneath a battered copy of Howard Berg's "Random Walks in Biology" text - whether anyone has analyzed the stock market with multidimensional diffusion tensor or finite element analysis. (Now say that ten times fast.) I'm sure someone's done it.
Thanks for the photo!
And you brought back memories of my finance undergrad and our bible, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Malkiel. I was told then to imagine the market as a man with a yo-yo walking up a hill with the advice that investors should focus on the steady rise of the hill, not the daily ups and downs of the yo-yo.
Jonah, its interesting you refer to the Random Walk of markets (based on the Efficient Market HYPOTHESIS), financial bubbles, and Sir Popper all within a few posts. Not easy to reconcile my friend. Science is best left to scientists and finance to alchemists.