Incorrect Pricing Or Quotes

It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors.

There are no good or bad horses, just correctly or incorrectly priced ones. This principle holds across all probabilistic domains: again, the goal is to get more than you pay for.

Open learning is frequently, and in my view, incorrectly trivialised as people ‘just chatting’ on social media. My belief is that this perception misses the point: ‘open’ is not simply about technology, it’s about behaviour shift as well.

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that American families pay 26 percent more for milk than they would pay if they paid real prices, i.e. the prices set by a free market. Whoever’s interest is being looked after, it isn’t the interest of the guy on a tight budget staring down a dry bowl of Count Chocula.

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

If you are going to use probability to model a financial market, then you had better use the right kind of probability. Real markets are wild. Their price fluctuations can be hair-raising-far greater and more damaging than the mild variations of orthodox finance. That means that individual stocks and currencies are riskier than normally assumed. It means that stock portfolios are being put together incorrectly; far from managing risk, they may be magnifying it. It means that some trading strategies are misguided, and options mis-priced. Anywhere the bell-curve assumption enters the financial calculations, an error can come out.

Why Did the Stock Market Crash? The most persuasive explanation for the 1929 stock market crash blames the Federal Reserve. Throughout the 1920s, but particularly in 1927, the Fed pumped artificial credit into the loan market, pushing down interest rates from their free-market level. Lower interest rates exaggerated the feeling of prosperity, and misled businesses and investors. In a laissez-faire market where money and banking are not disturbed by the government, the interest rate is a price that tells borrowers how much capital citizens have saved and made available to fund projects. But when the Fed adopts an “easy-money” policy by pushing down interest rates, this signal is distorted and the interest rate no longer does its job of channeling the available capital into the most deserving projects. Instead, an unsustainable boom develops, with firms hiring workers and starting production processes that will have to be discontinued once the Fed slows down its injections of new money. Many economists point to the Fed hikes in interest rates during 1928 and 1929 as the cause of the stock market crash. In a sense this is true, but the deeper point is that the crash was made inevitable by the bubble in the stock market fueled by the artificially cheap credit preceding the hikes. In other words, when the Fed stopped pumping in gobs of new money that pushed up the stock market, investors came to their senses and asset prices plunged back towards their pre-bubble level.

Good news is extrapolated into strong market expectations which are often not realized. As important, investor expectations are negatively correlated with model-based expected returns derived from dividend/price, consumption patterns and market valuation.  Investors, no matter what the level of experience, do not seem to use the models that provide useful information on expected returns. Put differently, when expected return models forecast higher returns, they are usually correct. When the expectations of returns are high from surveys, the actual returns are low. These market expectations are correlated with mutual fund flows. The surveys show expectation that investors actually use, albeit incorrectly.

The protective tariff was perhaps the most controversial economic issue of the antebellum period. High tariffs, intended to protect Northern industry from foreign competition, were a terrible burden to the agricultural South, which had little industry to protect. To Southerners, the tariffs meant higher prices for manufactured goods because they bought them abroad and paid the tariff or because they bought them from Northerners at the inflated prices that tariff protection made possible.

It’s a myth that “predatory pricing” exploited American consumers and created business monopolies. ★ Thanks to government subsidies, many of America’s railroads were often laid on inefficient, circuitous routes. ★ Rockefeller, Carnegie, Dow, and other great American businessmen did more for America than all the big-government programs combined.

The price is high for not defining requirements or not doing it well. Poorly defined requirements result in requirements defects—errors in requirements caused by incorrect, incomplete, missing, or conflicting requirements. Defective requirements may result in: • Cost overruns, • Expensive rework, • Poor quality, • Late delivery, • Dissatisfied customers, and • Exhausted and demoralized team members.

And what I know about price—what has been proven to me again and again—is that oil prices have become ever more unreliable as the systems that work on it become ever more financialized. Of all the things I have studied and correctly and incorrectly forecasted in my 30+ years in the oil markets, the one unshakable truth I have held onto is that the wide ranges of prices for oil we have seen in the last 15 years have been tethered far more to unrelated financial inputs than to the underlying fundamentals of oil. It has been those financial “gremlins” inside the machine that have made oil prices go so far above any logical expectation so many times, particularly in 2007 and 2010 and equally foolishly low as in 2009 and in 2015. Those wide extremes in price have done more than make and lose fortunes in the oil world. They've affected just about everything politically and socially in the rest of the world.

LINUS PAULING WAS WRONG about megavitamins because he had made two fundamental errors. First, he had assumed that you cannot have too much of a good thing. Vitamins are critical to life. If people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer various deficiency states, like scurvy (not enough vitamin C) or rickets (not enough vitamin D). The reason that vitamins are so important is that they help convert food into energy. But there’s a catch. To convert food into energy, the body uses a process called oxidation. One outcome of oxidation is the generation of something called free radicals, which can be quite destructive. In search of electrons, free radicals damage cell membranes, DNA, and arteries, including the arteries that supply blood to the heart. As a consequence, free radicals cause cancer, aging, and heart disease. Indeed, free radicals are probably the single greatest reason that we aren’t immortal. To counter the effects of free radicals, the body makes antioxidants. Vitamins—like vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene—as well as minerals like selenium and substances like omega-3 fatty acids all have antioxidant activity. For this reason, people who eat diets rich in fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, tend to have less cancer, less heart disease, and live longer. Pauling’s logic to this point is clear; if antioxidants in food prevent cancer and heart disease, then eating large quantities of manufactured antioxidants should do the same thing. But Linus Pauling had ignored one important fact: Oxidation is also required to kill new cancer cells and clear clogged arteries. By asking people to ingest large quantities of vitamins and supplements, Pauling had shifted the oxidation-antioxidation balance too far in favor of antioxidation, therefore inadvertently increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease. As it turns out, Mae West aside, you actually can have too much of a good thing. (“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.) Second, Pauling had assumed that vitamins and supplements ingested in food were the same as those purified or synthesized in a laboratory. This, too, was incorrect. Vitamins are phytochemicals, which means that they are contained in plants (phyto- means “plant” in Greek). The 13 vitamins (A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, and K) contained in food are surrounded by thousands of other phytochemicals that have long and complicated names like flavonoids, flavonols, flavanones, isoflavones, anthocyanins, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, tannins, isothiocyanates, carotenoids, allyl sulfides, polyphenols, and phenolic acids. The difference between vitamins and these other phytochemicals is that deficiency states like scurvy have been defined for vitamins but not for the others. But make no mistake: These other phytochemicals are important, too. And Pauling’s recommendation to ingest massive quantities of vitamins apart from their natural surroundings was an unnatural act. For example, as described in Catherine Price’s book, Vitamania, half of an apple has the antioxidant activity of 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C, even though it contains only 5.7 milligrams of the vitamin. That’s because the phytochemicals that surround vitamin C in apples enhance its effect

Price Changes: If a property has had a price drop, that indicates that the seller has accepted the fact that the list price was incorrect.

My intentions were good. I was trying to do what was best for Enron, but the way we as a company defined success was incorrect. We defined success by reported earnings and the stock price. We were not defining it as increasing economic value,

Though it sounds politically incorrect to modern ears, the gospel has always said that God may demand from us what he wants, since we do not belong to ourselves. Strictly speaking, we have no “inalienable rights.” God reserves all rights for himself. And this extends even to the realm of our sexuality—what we humans do with our bodies. “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord,” Paul counseled the Corinthians, adding, “and the Lord [is] for the body” (1 Corinthians 6: 13). “You are not your own,” he wrote, “for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (vv. 19–20).

Should the old federal broadcast rules have been abolished? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case, cable TV was making them iffy and the Internet was just about to start rendering them moot. In any case, when the Washington gatekeepers decided to get rid of that regulatory gate, it was a pivotal moment, practically and symbolically. For most of the twentieth century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.

The market is like Goldilocks. It decides if your price is too hot, too cold, or just right.

Provoking a price reduction sucks butt, so get it right this time. You don't wanna pucker-up for a second round with the same seller.

I once bought a piece of land for half its valued price. It emerged it was incorrectly listed by the realtor and was not showing up in local land searches!