Brian Gongol
The wizards who play hocus-pocus with stock charts are back again
Bloomberg chronicles the re-emergence of "technical charting" and other flim-flam acts that seek to explain the financial markets using charts alone. There are two gargantuan problems with technical analysis as an investing tool: First, it inevitably overlooks the compounded cycles that overlap to form market behavior. Trying to predict future prices by looking just at past prices is nonsense; as Benoit Mandelbrot pointed out in "The Misbehavior of Markets", the interactions among the millions of factors and cycles influencing stock prices make those prices chaotic. The second massive problem with technical analysis is that it treats stock shares like trading cards, rather than as pieces of a business. The pieces-of-a-business mentality is the only one that passes the philosophical test required to make a capitalist system succeed in the long run. There is a moral dimension to economic activity, and part of that dimension is shaped by the sense of ownership. Technical chartists take no sense of ownership in the businesses they trade.
Is e-mail the only thing Yahoo really has going for it?
E-mail is one utility that people cannot do without, and it's one of the few online services in which Yahoo has a lead over the other two of the big three Internet services firms, Google and Microsoft. Yahoo supposedly has almost twice as many e-mail subscribers as Microsoft's Hotmail, and more than three times as many as Google's Gmail. Is e-mail a profit center or a loss leader? The answer to that question may determine a lot about Yahoo's future.
Radio ratings: Even when they're better than ever, they're still not very good
Hilarious mis-translations strike again
But as much as we laugh now abotu signs in "Engrish", there probably should be a thousand times as many Americans studying Chinese as are doing so already
Five Nebraska lakes under alert; more in Iowa
