Sunday, April 19, 2015

Financial Blogger Personalities Analyzed By IBM's Watson

IBM has an interesting personality insights service. According to IBM "The Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more."

I thought it would be interesting to run this test on some well known financial bloggers......


I fed Josh's recent post "The Biggest Threat To You Portfolio" into the service and this is what IBM's Watson had to say.
"You are inner-directed and skeptical.
You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.
Your choices are driven by a desire for belongingness.
You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you."


For Barry I fed in his recent post (Protect Your Assets: Common-sense CyberSecurity for Investors) and Watson says....
"You are shrewd and somewhat insensitive.
You are proud: you hold yourself in high regard, satisfied with who you are. You are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. And you are assertive: you tend to speak up and take charge of situations, and you are comfortable leading groups.
Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.
You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you."
 


Here I plugged in Bill's text from this post. This is Watson's feedback.....
"You are inner-directed, heartfelt and rational.
You are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. And you are deliberate: you carefully think through decisions before making them.
Your choices are driven by a desire for organization.
You are relatively unconcerned with helping others: you think people can handle their own business without interference. You consider tradition to guide a large part of what you do: you highly respect the groups you belong to and follow their guidance."

Side Note: Wow did that really just say 0% for extraversion? Can't get more introverted then that. While I have not met Bill, considering his blog, why do I not find that surprising?


I used his most recent most  and it appears Watson confirms his Philosophical nature....
"You are inner-directed, skeptical and can be perceived as insensitive.
You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. And you are unconcerned with art: you are less concerned with artistic or creative activities than most people who participated in our surveys.
Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery.
You are relatively unconcerned with both taking pleasure in life and helping others. You prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. And you think people can handle their own business without interference."

So what does Watson say about me? I used my last post to find out....
"You are inner-directed, heartfelt and rational.
You are self-assured: you tend to feel calm and self-assured. You are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe. And you are dispassionate: you do not frequently think about or openly express your emotions.
Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery.
You are relatively unconcerned with helping others: you think people can handle their own business without interference. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person."

Interesting to see all the bloggers I put in (except for Barry) were said to be "Inner-Directed" first and foremost. Check out yourself or someone else here https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/

Friday, January 16, 2015

Doubleline Data Fail, The Stock Market Has been up for 7 straight years...and More!

Recently Jeffrey Gundlach from Doubleline had a conference call and soon the below chart was being passed around Twitter (even I passed it around, before stopping to think about it for a second).


However, as people may recall, we had quite strong markets in both the 80s and 90s. Yet this chart shows that the streaks never got longer than 5 years in those decades. However, a quick check of the history books will remind everyone that the market was up 8 straight years from 1982-1989 and then was also up 9 straight years from 1991-1999. Below are the 2 separate streaks. You will also notice that there was only 1 down year of -3.06% in 1990 that actually stopped it from being 18 straight years.


So how did Doubleline mess this up? Well according to their chart their source data appears to be well known shiller data http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/. The excel file is here. Odd they would use this for annual returns however, because that is not the purpose of the data...and you can't get calandar year returns from the data! (or any 1 year period for that matter) You will notice they say the streak in the 1980s was only 5 years. This is because they say the 1982 run ended in 1987....only 1987 was positive 5.81%. Why did they mess up? Well Shiller doesn't quote annual S&P returns. He only gives monthly S&P levels and they are NOT the starting or ending level for the month. They are the AVERAGE S&P level for the month. So the fact of the matter is you can't get calendar year returns from this data . Here is what it looks like 
The market closed at 242.12 on 12/31/86 and closed at 247.08 on 12/31/87. That's 2% up plus the dividends got you to 5.81% for 1987. None of those numbers match the Shiller data because his data is the AVERAGE close for everyday of the month.

So now everyone can stop repeating this inaccurate information. Thanks! (yes I did it too!)
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Additional Note: I have since come across an article where Roland Kaloyan of Societe Generale states in December "Since 1875, we have never seen the S&P rise for seven calendar years in a row, so an eighth year would seem highly unlikely,". Who was the originator of this myth?