Reviews for The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don't [With Earbuds] (...

The average rating for The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don't [With Earbuds] (... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-05 00:00:00 Gidian Plebuch So far I like this book, the author makes some good points that are worth listening to. On the other hand, he has a tendency to use "eyeball statistics". That is he collects data to support his virepoint but then draws conclusions based solely on what the data look like. For example on page 82, he has a table of data to support his view that the idea that market performance for the whole year is not reflected in performance for January. But I did a chi-square analysis of the data and it proves the exact opposite; with a p value of 0.0003, there is strong evidence that January performance to some extent predicts annual performance. I then generated some random data by generating 85 random numbers in one column and then for each of these numbers generating a further random number by adding 11 times a new random number to the one in the first column. I then calculated the correlation co-efficient which averaged over multiple trials was around 0.08 or 1/12. In other words, the first random number contributes 1/12 of the value of the second one. And presumably you'd find the same with real data: on average a single month contributes 1/12 towards the annual outcome. So it is predictive, just not stronly predictive.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-06 00:00:00 Robert Price Good straightforward observations on the mindset behind investing. (1) What do you believe that is actually false? (2) How can I fathom what others find unfathomable? (3) What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me now? The most useful concept in this book for me was using statistical correlation. He basically challenged me to check all my theories and use Excel's '=correl' function to do it. As I've started to do this, it has rearranged some of my concepts and made me realize that my brain really can blindside me. Good book. Brash, informative and useful.