Dominating the front page of the science section of the New York Times the other day was a large graphic that depicted the stages of a jump that is a specialty of Ryan St. Onge, who will be competing in freestyle aerials at the Winter Olympics.  Specifically, it showed each element of “a triple-flip jump with a full twist in each of the second and third flips.”  I got dizzy just looking at it.The New York Times | The online link does not have the graphic, but it does have a video.  Even better.

The article — as you might expect in something called the “Science Times” — quickly started breaking down the physics of it all, and then examined how jumpers who do those types of maneuvers make the tiny adjustments while en route that will allow them to master those natural forces (and maybe even take home a gold).

What caught my eye was this paragraph:

But while not in the air, Mr. St. Onge devotes a lot of time to analyzing what he does.  “I

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While there tends to be a right size of things beyond which problems seem to occur,The Reformed Broker | Which was the “In 2009, I learned that . . .” lesson that I shared in this compilation by Joshua Brown. there is also a right scope of things.  As with individuals, organizations struggle with the question of how specialized versus how generalized they should be in their efforts.  Personally, we often know if the fit is bad (”a square peg in a round hole”), but in aggregating our efforts it is more difficult to optimize our approach.

There are certainly errors that are made by being spread too thin.  In my own case, I think that my roles as a consultant, advisor, and writer work off of each other in a way that yields benefits for my clients, but there are days when I wonder if I’m getting the equation wrong.  As for firms, we need look no further than the “financial supermarkets” of yore (for a time, I was a cog in one of the many ... continues

Every now and again, a phrase sticks in your head.  I’m not above grabbing them for blog titles,the research puzzle | As was the case with “situational awareness” after a pair of Northwest pilots claimed to have lost it a few months ago. and this one comes from an email sent to me more than a year ago by a former colleague.

He and I have had long-running discussions about what should be expected of investment analysts, from the tools of the trade that they need to learn to the type of individuals that seem to find success.  It was within that context that he wished for “unbiased industriousness” from himself and others that are charged with analyzing investments.  A better short description of excellence could not be found anywhere.

The investment business touches all of our lives.  The proverbial man on the street is faced with decisions about how to deal with the complexity of the markets and  uncertainty regarding intermediaries that proclaim ... continues

One staple of the investment research game is the target price, that device for indicating where a stock will trade at some future time.  Usually a data item on a research report, it can be visualized as well:

But wait, another line has been added.  What shall we call it?  I always refer to it as “the error price,” although analysts never have any idea what I’m talking about when I do.  Research is mostly a game of “how high,” with little time spent on understanding risks, and no term has come into common usage to describe the concept I feature here.

But before we look at that bottom line, let’s look at the top one.  If you find yourself in front of a Bloomberg machine or the like, you can see how the average target price for a given stock has varied over time.  Certainly some quantitative genius has found a way to integrate that series with other information into a profit-making stew, but it’s hard to find a mushier data series than ... continues

And so we come to the end of my series on the Global Research Analyst Settlement.the research puzzle | Here’s the entire series of postings. Fittingly (since we all like round numbers so much), this is also posting number one hundred of these little essays since I started blogging.  I guess it’s time to pull together some of the loose ends.

As I have indicated in previous postings, October 31 marked the end of my involvement in the settlement.  That meant wading through the paper files that piled up from research firms, the performance evaluation service that I used, and that I produced myself — and sending them off for archival storage, probably never to be read again.  In addition, there were more than fifty gigabytes of electronic information (including over seventeen thousand emails and Excel spreadsheets of all manner and complexity) copied onto a drive for posterity.

While my documents have been put to rest, there are some loose ends for the settlement.  ... continues