God's Diagnostician Also Investment Genius!
What with the Repugs' implosion and the rise in Virgin Mary sightings, this post has been on the back burner here at Agitprop. But it's important. You will all recall that Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader and video diagnostician, is currently being investigated by the SEC for insider trading. Frist apparently lied about the reason he sold his stock at the top of the market.
But Bill is but one thread in a much larger investment tapestry. In a piece in The New Yorker, James Surowiecki observes that a systematic study last year
looked at six thousand stock transactions made by senators between 1993 and 1998. Over that time, senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per cent annually. Since a mutual-fund manager who beats the market by two or three per cent a year is considered a genius, the politicians’ ability to foresee the future seems practically divine. They did an especially good job of picking up stocks at just the right time; their buys were typically flat before they bought them, but beat the market by thirty per cent, on average, in the year after. By those standards, Frist actually looks like a bit of a piker.
Now why do you suppose senators beat financial geniuses? Do you suppose it's because, as the authors of the study suggest, "at least some senators must have been trading 'based on information that is unavailable to the public'—in other words, they were engaged in some form of insider trading"?
No!
Kvatch kvetches on this here.
tags: bill frist james surowiecki stock market investing
Personally, I'm hoping Frist beat's the rap and joins Fidelity. Then I can invest all of my 401K's money with him. I mean...hell...beating the market by 12% is huge. HUGE!
Posted by: Kvatch | November 14, 2005 at 06:17 PM
No shit! And why do you think the brain dead of this world spend so much money to get elected? They might think it immoral to raise the minimum wage after 10 years stagnation but putting a little aside for their retirement years seems prudent in their eyes. So let's make sure a whole hell of a lot of them have to start dipping into their carefull built up reserve funds come Next November.
Posted by: GRUMPY OLD MAN | November 15, 2005 at 12:21 AM
The corruption and lack of accountability is truly amazing.
Posted by: larkohio | November 15, 2005 at 09:02 AM
Geez, I guess all those med students I used to know are right -- they really are smarter than God (NOT).
Posted by: Kathy | November 15, 2005 at 11:03 AM