Assorted Links 9/29/08

Hey guys. Here's a few interesting links I've picked up the last few days around the internet:

1) Housing is still overpriced. Along with some pretty compelling graphs.

2) From good to great!... and then bankrupt. Many of the companies in the book Good to Great are doing terribly now, which forces you to question the original wisdom of the book. The companies include (!) Fannie Mae.

3) Quotes on investing. From Paul Graham, Warren Buffett, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, among others.

Hope you are all having good summers. If you have something interesting to share but don't want to post it yourself you can e-mail it to me and I'll pass it along.

Campaign Contributions at Vassar

From the perspective of the contributor, donating money to a campaign can be seen as an investment. You are allocating assets in the hope of future will be to office.

Here's some interesting data from Fundrace.com on the campaign contributions from professors at Vassar:


It's almost an even split... between Obama and Clinton. Why have no professors donated to the McCain campaign? I have three hypotheses:

1) Professors at Vassar almost unanimously support Obama.

2) Professors at Vassar who may support McCain are afraid of being ostracized by their peers if they donate to a Republican candidate, so they either do not donate or do not list their profession as a Vassar Professor.

3) McCain supporters at Vassar are too pragmatic with their money to donate small amounts of it to a presidential campaign.

I'm leaning towards #1, but #3 is an intriguing possibility.

(Hat tip: Mads Vassar.)

Assorted Links

1) An article from Overcoming Bias on the biases involved in investing. Money quotes:

Basically, the totally rational investor won't count what he can't quantify, but much of the value in investing, or entrepreneurship, comes from an option value that is impossible to quantify. I know someone who built a product based on an optimization routine for superior investment strategy—the flagship idea failed, it never had a chance, but his system is now a popular risk management tool.

2) Venture capitalist Fred Wilson discusses the potential Yahoo and Microsoft merger. He calls it the "soap opera drama that won't go away." Indeed.

3) A new form of performance evaluation, using "matching" stocks to account for the fact that many of the stocks chosen by investors are not as large-cap as the S&P.