I get a lot of comments that make me feel insane because I think stocks are fairly valued, or that you could be waiting forever for the next big crash. Just so you know, I’m a big fan of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, I love companies with low 10-year PE ratios, and I do […]
The world’s most undervalued stock markets
Recently I’ve written about the inverse of P/E ratio (which I call corporate earnings yield) vs. risk-free return (government bond yields). As inflation expectations drop, interest rates also drop, and valuations adjust higher as investors expect less return on their investments. It’s a simple relationship (more below), and it shows that US stocks are fairly […]
The seasonality of Chicago crime
I wrote a couple posts on Chicago crime: 13 data narratives and Chicago crime by hour. But the data are so interesting that I wanted to dig deeper into the seasonality of Chicago crime. Before I was using trendlines to show this, but by switching to a color-box like below, we can more easily compare […]
Financial instability, ha!
People seem really worried about a bubble in stocks. What do they recommend? That the Fed raise rates now to pop the bubble. Recently Ben Bernanke has weighed in on whether monetary policy is the right tool to correct for financial imbalances. Scott Sumner has a nice reply on how the Fed’s popping the stock market […]
Waiting forever for the next big crash
This was an interesting proposition from economist Steen Jakobsen: take 6 months off from the market. With the S&P 500 P/E ratio at 20 and the Shiller CAPE at 27, the market does appear historically overvalued. But stocks are a security like any other. You take the risk-free rate of return (10-year treasuries at 1.9%), add a […]
Which telecom stock should you pick?
Bernanke’s new blog
I’ve been reading former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s new blog with fascination. His first posts have been interesting, but also seem like an excuse for overly tight Fed policy. On interest rates (part 1, part 2, part 3), he gives a good defense of why the Fed has kept rates low: …raising interest rates prematurely […]
Visualizing crime by hour in Chicago
A comment on my blog from spreadsheetjournalism suggested that looking at Chicago crime data in Excel might yield more insights because you could better see crime by hour. This is certainly possible in Tableau, and the visuals will bring quicker insight in rapid-fire succession when compared to an Excel pivot table. Before delving into the data, I suspect […]
Don’t invest in Bitcoin either: the perils of gold, cash & code
I have a guest post over on Diginomics about the 3 monetary paradoxes of Bitcoin. Since yesterday’s post was about not investing in gold, it seems like a good segue to advise you not to invest in Bitcoin either. For that matter, don’t keep your savings in cash. All these assets have one thing in […]
Never invest in gold
Unfortunately I only have time for a short post today. For another project I created the visualization below, indexing NGDP, 10-year treasuries, inflation and gold at 100 starting in 1933. For 10-year treasuries and inflation, the lines show what $100 would have become by applying 10-year yield / inflation rate in each year, compounded. What do […]