It’s not easy to generate alpha as an analyst at a quant fund these days. Most of the signals that are likely to make money have been discovered, so you find yourself sitting around running a lot of back-testing regressions on anything that could, however implausibly, predict financial results. It’s a stressful, lonely job, and if you’re low on good ideas your mind may wander to whatever is closest to hand.
That appears to be how Tatu Westling of the University of Helsinki came up with this:
The question is whether and how strongly the average sizes of male organ are associated with GDPs between 1960 and 1985? It is argued here that the average size – the erect length, to be precise – of male organ in population has a strong predictive power of economic development during the period. The exact causality can only be speculated at this point but the correlations are robust.
What could possibly go wrong? We took a look.
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“Looking forward to retirement, Gordon?”So, the economic recovery is still a little slow in materializing. U.S. GDP grew by only 2.2% in the third quarter, less than the 2.8% the experts and Commerce Dept. predicted. Fear not.
“We are really starting to see the mechanisms for a sustained recovery come into place,” said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “We are starting to see investment numbers come back.”
We’ll have to take your word for it. On the bright side, at least our economy is growing (after shrinking for a solid year), and corporate profits grew by even more than we expected. The same cannot be said for our Anglophone brethren on the other side of the Atlantic, which remains the last recessing economy in the universe.
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The only real upside is that the 0.3% annualized contraction in the third quarter was less than the 0.5% that was generally expected. I’m not really sure how to take that, other than as a sign that the market is hopelessly clueless. But that’s not really new, is it?
Economy Shrinks as Consumers Retreat [CNBC]
