Turducken? Meh! I want a TurBacon Epic

We survived Thanksgiving with the Unknown In-Laws. The Unknown Wife, her mom, and her sisters are all good cooks, so we easily put on a couple of pounds.

Many of you have heard of the Turducken (a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed into a de-boned turkey).

But these folks have gone several steps better - the TurBacon Epic: a 20lb pig stuffed with a 8lb turkey, a 6lb duck, a 4lb chicken, a cornish hen, a quail, bacon croissant stuffing, and 10 lbs of bacon wrapped around all the layers. It's "only 79,046 calories and roughly 6,900 grams of food coma inducing fat.

To quote Yakov Smirnoff, "What a Country!"

New Video on Risk and Return

I've posted a new video on Risk and Return - it covers the typical material presented in and introductory class from the math of risk and return (Expected returns, standard deviations, covariance and correlation) through Markowitz Portfolio Theory and the Capital Market Line through the CAPM and the Security Market Line. it has a table of contents, so you can skip around. Click on the video below to see it - it's a pretty big file, so it might take a while to load.


In case you don't want to view the whole thing at one sitting (it's a bout 90 minutes), the video is organized as follows (I reference the numbers in the Table of Contents):

1. Sections 1-13 (roughly from the beginning to 38 minutes in - the "math" risk and return (Expected Returns, Standard Deviation, Covariance, and Correlation)
2. Sections 14-25 (from minutes 38 to 75): Markowitz Portfolio Theory and the Capital Market Line
3. Sections 26-32 (Minutes 75 to the end): Systematic and Unsystematic Risk, The CAPM and the Security Market Line

I hope you find it useful. Comments (of course) are welcome.

Happy Thanksgiving

It looks like Unknown University is all but deserted the day before Thanksgiving. I finally decided to quit swimming against the tide, and canceled classes for today (I usually only get about 30% attendance on the day before Thanksgiving in the best of times, so it's no big loss).

Instead, I told the students that I'd put up a video with the lectures for the week on Risk and Return. Once it's done, I'll post a link here. I'm pretty happy with it - it runs the gamut of topics from the calculations for standard deviation, covariance, expected returns, etc... to Markowitz Portfolio Theory and the Capital Market Line to the CAPM and the Security Market Line.

Although I don't use all this material in my intro class, I expect to use it in my investments class this spring. So, this should allow me to go a bit faster and cover more material there.

Unfortunately, I have to wait another hour before the video software is done rendering the final version and I can go home. Then it's off the the Unknown In-Laws house tomorrow for turkey overload and football.

Here's wishing you all a Happy and safe Thanksgiving

Kissing Up is Good Practice

It's important to be good at the technical aspects of your job. But the "soft" stuff may be even more cirtical - the ability to get along with coworkers (and more important, with bosses) has a lot to do with eventual career success.

Tow researchers (Ithai Stern at Northwestern University and James Westphal at the University of Michigan) recently published a study in Administrative Science Quarterly titled "Stealthy Footsteps to the Boardroom: Executives’ Backgrounds, Sophisticated Interpersonal Infl uence
Behavior, and Board Appointments (here's an ungated copy). They lay out several effective ways of "kissing up" to the boss:

• Go with discomfort: Preface compliments to the boss with something like "I don't want to embarrass you, but..."
• Frame it in question form: Ask for advice - it's just as flattering as a compliment. goes down a lot easier
• Bait and switch: Start out by disagreeing with the boss and then gradually warm to their opinion. Instead of being a "Yes Man", be a "'No,' then 'Yes'" man).
• Go around the corner: Find a third-party (best if it's a close confidant of the boss), and talk admiringly about the boss. Odds are, it will get passed on.
• Look for common ground: Pick a topic (anything from parenting to religion to politics) and make unsolicited statements and opinions about the matter that you think are also held by your target. Positive impressions will lower the red-flags on future praise.
• Look for common groups: Bring up social affiliations that you may have in common.

All in all, pretty clever stuff. Not that I'd ever use any of these, but if I were to...

Happy Thanksgiving From the TSA

Luckily, we're not flying this Thanksgiving - we live a mere 2 hours from our families. But in case you are, here's a pretty funny clip from SNL.


Now take off you D**n shoes!

Yo Momma is a Data Miner

Having a lot of data makes research easier - we now have more data in easily readable formats than ever before, and an amazing amount of computing power on our desktops (I have far more horsepower on my desk than NASA had in total in the 1980s)..

Unfortunately, there's a flip side to that coin - we can easily find variables (or specifications) that seem to "predict" returns (or just about anything). In reality, we're often just overfitting the data.

Here's a pretty good piece on the topic titled "Yo Momma is a Data Miner", by David Leinwebber in which he fits a polynomial time-series regression to the S&P 500 with surprising (if you don;t follow what he's doing) good results - particularly since he's using things like the sheep population and Bangladesh Butter production as regressors.

I Did Not Know Damodaran Had a Blog

Aswath Damodaran has written a couple of excellent textbooks (on valuation and corporate finance), both of which are among my core reference materials. He also wecasts his valuation class at NYU (available here)

But I didn't know that he also has a blog - Musings on Markets. Just a quick glance over the last couple of months gave me several good articles to read:

High Dividend Stocks: Do They Beat the Market?

Capital Structure: Optimal or Opportunistic?

What if Nothing is Risk Free?

He doesn't update regularly (but who am I to talk). In any event, check it out.

HT: Finance Clippings

Making The Grade

I was cleaning out some to the 1500+ emails I've let accumulate in my gmail account (unlimited space leads to sloppy housekeeping), and I came across this old (but still excellent) piece titled "Making the Grade", by Georgia Tech physics professor Kurt Weisenfeld:

IT WAS A ROOKIE ERROR. AFTER 10 YEARS I SHOULD HAVE known better, but I went to my office the day after final grades were posted. There was a tentative knock on the door.
""Professor Wiesenfeld? I took your Physics 2121 class? I flunked it? I wonder if there's anything I can do to improve my grade?'' I thought: ""Why are you asking me? Isn't it too late to worry about it? Do you dislike making declarative statements?''

...Time was, when you received a grade, that was it. You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof (and, yes, sometimes a tough grader). In the last few years, however, some students have developed a disgruntled-consumer approach. If they don't like their grade, they go to the ""return'' counter to trade it in for something better.

What alarms me is their indifference toward grades as an indication of personal effort and performance. Many, when pressed about why they think they deserve a better grade, admit they don't deserve one but would like one anyway. Having been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem, they've learned that they can get by without hard work and real talent if they can talk the professor into giving them a break.

Read the whole thing here - it'll be part of my next semester's syllabus.

Entrepreneurship and Satan's Learning-Challenged Little Brother

Although most people know him as the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams may also be one of the funniest writers around. Here's a recent piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Online where he talks about dissatisfaction as a major driver of entrepreneurship:

I wasn't suffering alone. Many of my co-workers already had active side businesses and ambitious expansion plans. The guy in the cubicle behind me was running a concert equipment rental business. Across from me was a guy running a computer tech support business. We had Amway dealers, Mary Kay sales people, inventors, authors and just about any other business you can imagine. That's not counting all of the business plans in the incubation phase. I think we all understood that working in a cubicle and being managed by Satan's learning-challenged little brother was not a recipe for happiness.

Actually, it was a hamster-brained sociopath of a boss that made me think about going into academia.

Read the whole thing here. - it's good for a laugh (and it makes a lot of good points, too).

The Fun of The Exam Continues

It seems like every semester, I get at least one student who bombs an exam (or two) and reacts in a way-over-the-top manner. Last semester, it was a senior finance major (with a pretty high GPA) who suffered from anxiety attacks. She drew a complete blank during my Advanced Corporate Finance midterm. She subsequently appeared in several professors' offices wondering tearfully if she should change her major in her senior year. We eventually talked her down off the ledge, and she even subsequently took my Student-Managed Investment Fund class, where she did just fine.

But this semester took the grand prize. The 80/20 rule says that 20% of your students cause 80% of your problems. That would be true this semester if you counted ONE student alone as my 80%. She (we'll call her Brittany henceforth) is to put it succinctly, a bit of a Princess - high maintenance, dressed entirely in designer clothes, vocal, bossy to her friends, and simply not doing well in the class. BP informed me two weeks into the class that she's taking 18 (or is it 20) credits this semester because she needs to graduate this spring. So she "really really really needs to pass this class." She constantly whines in class about the workload because she has soooo much on her plate, and complains about any thing that doesn't pass her standards (by which she means, anything that she doesn't understand easily). And nothing is ever her fault.

Her first exam grad was a 55. The most recent exam (the second of four) was a 58. The rest of the class seems to be getting it -- in fact, as I recently posted, the class average was one of the highest I've seen on this exam in about ten years of teaching. The class has really respodned to the challenge - they've not only stepped up their game, they seem to have realized that complaining to me about the workload is like trying to teach a pig how to sing (i.e. they expend effort, accomplish nothing, and both they and the pig (that's me) get annoyed). Except for Brittany the Princess - she's used to getting her way with whining and intimidation, so she keeps trying.

After she got her exam back, (it was handed back Monday - the drop deadline for the class), she came to my office wondering if she should stay or drop. She wanted assurances that if she was "close", I'd give her the minimum passing grade (since it's required, all she needs is a D-). Unfortunately, I couldn't give her any such assurances - I said that I often make the cutoff for the various grades somewhat lower than what's in the syllabus, but that's done on a case by case basis after looking at the overall class performance, and that whether or not she should stay in the class is a decision that only she could make. So far, there's nothing new to the story - pretty much standard stuff we've all seen many times.

Then the fun started.

BP goes out into the hall and starts sobbing and wailing. That's right, wailing. You could hear her almost on the other side of the building. Of course, I stay safely in my office - there's no way on God's Green Earth I'm going out to deal with that, because there are (like Bear Bryant said about passing the football) only a few things that can happen, and most of them are bad. Luckily, one of the female staff from one of our institutes came out and said "honey, why don't you go into that empty classroom so that you'll have some privacy" (read: "so that you won't be such a spectacle"). The staff worker said that she figured that the student in question was used to using the "cry out loud and maybe you'll get what you want" card. Shortly thereafter, several of her classmates (the ones who she hangs with) came in to my office and said "don't worry about Brittany, UP - she'll be fine. She does this to get attention and to see if she can get you to give her what she wants).

Unfortunately for my blood pressure, she decided not to drop the class.

Ah well - another day in academia. At least I'll have more Brittany stories to share as the semester progresses.

The Unknown Students Nail an Exam

I've been teaching the undergraduate core finance class this semester, . If you've been teaching for a while, you know that it's easy in that class to get discouraged by students who are (pick any or all that apply) unmotivated, unable to do simple math, whiny, unwilling to be stretched, never darken your office doorway, etc...

This semester, I made a conscious decision to really push my students - since the first week of September, they've two exams, three very involved problem sets (with a lot of curves thrown in - the typical one takes about 3-5 hours to complete), eight online quizzes, and short pop quizzes (they typically last 5 minutes or less and contain 1 or 2 basic questions on the material to be covered for the day's class) on average every other day, and almost constant cold-calling in class (in a 50 minute class, I typically call on 15-20 students). I like to think that I've set the bar at a far higher level than the other sections of the intro class being taught this semester. In fact, some of my students have told me that I've brought the class together - they're getting together in study groups of as many as 10 at a time (and there was supposedly a study group the night before the first exam of almost twenty students).

I've also made a decision to teach in full-blown crazy mode. Those who've heard my bloviations over the years know that I'm a flaming extrovert that tends toward (in my better moments) impressions of Ahnuld (I Am The Denominator!), Mister Rogers, Kermit The Frog, Inigo Montoya, and various characters from the Simpsons, South Park, and Monty Python, often in rapid succession. The last few years, the Unknown Son's illness had really taken a toll on my zest for teaching (and it showed in my evaluations). While he passed away almost 18 months ago, it's only been this semester that I've really felt like the "old" me. So, teaching has been a real pleasure.

Well, my class just had their second exam, and to put it bluntly, they did more damage to the exam than the Republicans did to the Democrats in the last election - they knocked it out of the park. There was the usual variation in grades, of course (one student got a 23 - It's never when your grade approximates your age), but on the whole they performed better than any comparable class I can remember going back to the late 1990's.

So, there is hope. It's nice to see that when you set the bar high (and meet the students more than halfway), they respond to the challenge.

Terry Pratchett Quotes

Before J.K. Rowland, Terry Pratchett was the best-selling British fantasy author of the 1990s. He's written more than 60 books (either by himself or in collaboration with a coauthor). In fact, while I was at the recent FMA conference I made a comment "There can only be... one thousand" at a reception,a and found that an Irish friend of mine was a fellow Pratchett-phile.

So imagine my enjoyment at finding out there's a repository of Pratchett quotes titled the Pratchett Quote File (you can also get it in a test file here). Here's one that struck home (note that the Unknown Wife and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary):

Sam Vimes could parallel process. Most husbands can. They learn to follow
their own line of thought while at the same time listening to what their
wives say. And the listening is important, because at any time they could
be challenged and must be ready to quote the last sentence in full. A vital
additional skill is being able to scan the dialogue for telltale phrases
such as "and they can deliver it tomorrow" or "so I've invited them for
dinner?" or "they can do it in blue, really quite cheaply."
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)

Unfortunately, skimming through the quote file just burned an hour and a half of my time. I guess I really don't want to start grading the 70 exams currently sitting on my desk (each of which has 10 pages of work in it). Unfortunately, I just gave the exam tonight, and I want to give them back on Wednesday (it's the drop date for the semester).