2000: The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science. A great many manipulations and even distortions are possible within the bounds of propriety. Often the statistician must choose among methods, a subjective process, and find the one that he will use to represent the facts. In commercial practice he is about as unlikely to select an unfavorable method as a copywriter is to call his sponsors product flimsy and cheap when he might as well say light and economical.
–Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993 ed.), p. 120.
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Some Summer Reading
2026: People are always asking me what I’m reading. Because I think and talk and read about investing all day long, I typically don’t read financial…
Latest articles
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Summon Your Courage and Buy Stocks
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What’s Luck Got to Do with It?
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You’re Not Paranoid. The Market Is Out to Get You.
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Messing Up the Closest Thing to a Sure Thing in the Stock Market
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What Bill Ackman Got Wrong With His Bungled IPO
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A Couple Won the Powerball. Investing It Turned Into Tragedy
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Why Your Fund Manager Can’t Beat Today’s Stock Market
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Hot Funds and the Curse of ‘Self-Inflated Returns’
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Thought of the Day
Money in Art, Money in Culture
Books
Jason is the author of “Your Money and Your Brain,” on the neuroscience of investing, and the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor,” the classic text that Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.”
