January 2, 2005
DEMOCRATS WORRY FOLKS WON'T BE ABLE TO FIGURE OUT PRIVATE SS OPTIONS?:
The year of the monkey (DAVID ROEDER, January 2, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)
Mr. Adam Monk is in his glory. He has won the right to say, "I told you so.''Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2005 10:13 AMThe Sun-Times' favorite market sage, a cebus monkey and honored elder statesman of his species, heard all the naysaying and the doubters. He knew that when his 2004 portfolio of five stocks, picked at the start of the year, slipped into negative territory around midyear, people were starting to talk.
But it turns out he has a better end game than John Elway or Tiger Woods. Mr. Monk had a dynamite fourth quarter, with two of his stocks busting loose. That gave his portfolio a 36 percent gain for 2004, thoroughly thumping the single-digit performances of major market indexes and your average mutual fund manager, who is paid richly to outperform other primates.
The result was remarkably similar to Mr. Monk's returns in 2003, when he achieved a gain of 37 percent with a different set of five stocks. He outperformed the Dow Jones industrials and the Standard & Poor's 500 that year, but this time made it a clean sweep, besting the Nasdaq composite index as well.
He's an actual monkey? Here's a picture of a cebus:
http://zoltantakacs.com/zt/im/scan/animals/monkey_capuchin_3722_340.jpg
The Democrats' argument would be that the market is so unpredictable, you can't get any better advice on your Social Security portfolio from a homan being than tyou can by just bringing a newspaper down to the local zoo. Of course, this wouldn't ba an argument John Corzine would take to the masses with vigor, but others surely would go in front of the cameras to make the claim.
(Actually, when I first read the start of the story I thought the up-to-this-point very liberal Tony Shalhoub was having a change of attitude and was about to become the Wayne Rogers of his generation, but the writer just got his first name on the show wrong. Oh well...)
Posted by: John at January 2, 2005 11:18 AMIt's just the typical liberal arts major conceit. Since they are incapable of engaging in the kind of sophisticated analysis that real financial professionals(not your local stockbroker who is merely a jumped-up car salesman) engage in all the time, they see that analysis as worthless. Let them spend a few weekends poring through the most basic finance textbooks and their heads would explode.
As Richard Reeves, a physics major at Stevens, pointed out, we can do everything the liberal arts types can do and they can't do anything we can do.
Posted by: Bart at January 2, 2005 12:15 PM