Like miners panning for gold, number-crunchers love the stockmarket. There are thousands of different securities prices to analyse, decades-worth of data to dissect. Academics can make their reputation by discovering an anomaly in prices, such as smaller companies outperforming the index over the long term. But are these anomalies a route to riches or the equivalent of iron pyrite ("fool's gold")? They may just be data quirks-what statisticians call "noise".
展开▼
