Was out of town most of the last couple of weeks. Moving links to Saturdays going forward.
Good post from Ben Carlson on benchmarking. For the individual investor, just being aware of what a benchmark is and why you should pay attention to one puts you way ahead of the game. I’m always amazed how many “sophisticated” investors (endowments, corporations, etc.) spend months selecting an investment manager, and then don’t have a benchmark to compare their performance to going forward.
Scott Sumner on gov’t mandated salary increases and market “tantrums”. My rule of thumb is that anyone who refers to market actions as a ‘tantrum’ is probably not very smart, just got whipsawed in the market, or both.
Scott Alexander on happiness in China (and elsewhere). I can’t help but jump to the (obvious?) conclusion that happiness is felt on a scale relative to something other than the rest of the globe, e.g., their fellow countrymen, the same scale on which the change in wealth is measured.
Promising study on ‘tracking’ (the practice of separating high-achieving students from their peers). Everything I know intuitively and from my own anecdotal experience says that being with higher-level people day in and day out results in better outcomes. The really interesting part is how there is no negative effect on those who aren’t elevated to the higher level.
Finally, Arbital, which I think has a chance to be a huge step forward in house people learn about concepts. Their (I don’t know what to call it, curriculum?) Bayes’ stuff was really fun to go through. Since if we round to the nearest 10, I have 0 readers, I don’t think they’ll mind my link.