Money worthless, says FT

[peterbirks]

A few months ago there was a leak of an internal memo written by a senior editor on Express Newspapers. He had lambasted journalists and writers on the Sunday Express for a litany of what could be described as schoolboy errors. Unfortunately he let himself down when he said that the sentence "Fewer than one in five" was bad journalism. "Fewer than one in five is none in five", he claimed, presumably unaware that fewer than one in five is also one in six.

Anyhoo, this morning the FT confirmed that all sub-editors who understand anything of finance have been made redundant by printing the headline "Currencies tumble amid renewed pessimism".

Currencies tumble? What does that mean precisely? How do you measure the worth of currency? You might just as well write "currencies surge", because if one currency falls, it is as measured by the value of another currency. Alternatively, you could write that "gold surges". or "commodities surge", which is, in a way, synonymous with "currencies tumble". But I've never seen anyone refer to a surge in the cost of an asset (be it a commodity, or whatever) with the line "value of money falls".

++++++++++

I managed to rack up the biggest loss of the year yesterday, starting, as usual, with a bad beat, and continuing with a couple of sets under sets and neat plays by opponents (the opposition always seems to make fewer mistakes when you are running bad!). And culminating, inveitably, with some dubious marginal calls on the river that were incorrect.

On the plus side, I was due a down-day, and the loss ($598) didn't have much of a psychological effect. As I wrote earlier in the year, one of my aims was to be able to suffer $500 losses with a shrug of the shoulders, and I appear to have achieved that aim. Whether I could suffer successive $500 losses so calmly, or whether I could suffer such a loss after a long period of break-even, I do not yet know.

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Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

You may be missing a space in your subject line.

Unfortunately he let himself down when he said that the sentence "Fewer than one in five" was bad journalism. "Fewer than one in five is none in five", he claimed, presumably unaware that fewer than one in five is also one in six.

Mmmmm-m-m-m-m-m. I think the phrase "fewer than one in five" is a wise choice if and only if three conditions are true.

1) You don't want to use percentages.
2) The actual proportion is between one in six and one in five.
3) You want to emphasise how low the proportion is, for some reason.

I'm not sure there is ever a good reason for condition 1 to be true, but this may be a biased opinion.

Poker: do you ever use any software that evaluates your decisions in Sklansky dollars? curtainspoker swears by PokerEV (http://pokerevsoftware.com/) and - for a long time - managed to condition himself to care about the quality of his decisions as measured by PokerEV rather than about the results.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Regarding your propostion (1), journalists have great diffficulty with whether to write "Less than 20% or "Fewer than 20% or "Under 20%". However, none of these looks good as a start to a story, which would presumably be the reason for starting it with the phrase "Fewer than one in five...".

With reference to Sklansky dollars, my Hold Em Manager has an all-in EV calculator, but this graph is a rough tool at best (although it's probably very good for measuring luck in tournaments).

I say this because I quite often commit a player on the flop (or even pre-flop) for a significant percentage of his stack. If he then hits and I call his subsequent bet when a big underdog, it gives a misleading impression of the situation. He has already made his mistake before the all-in decision is made. It's much harder for software to evaluate decisions in Sklansky dollars before all the money goes in, particularly if your opponent subsequently folds when he misses.

To take a simple example. I have AA and opponent has 66. He has $50. He limps and I raise him $10. He calls. Now, roughly speaking, one time in 10 he will hit a set (it's slightly more often than this, but this makes the numbers easier). One time in 10 I will hit a set, one time in 100 we will both hit sets, and about 8 times in 10 neither of us will hit a set.

In the 100 hands we thus get me winning $10 from him 79 times (plus $790 to me), me losing $50 to him 10 times (minus $500 to me) and me winning $50 from him once (plus $50 to me), for a net gain of $340 over 100 hands, or $3.40 a hand.

However, nearly every time ALL the money goes in I will be a 90% underdog.

But, yes, I do tend to look at Sklansky dollars for the all-in performance.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I've done those numbers v quickly and it's late. Th epoint here is not those actual numbers, but the principle of a player making his mistake before all the money goes in.

PJ

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're giving too much credit to (traditionally) innumerate journalists. Why, only today, in the otherwise respected Sunday paper ****** (insert rag of choice here: clue -- it weren't the NotW), we see the following ludicrous misrepresentation of actualite:

"US plans to increase forces in Afghanistan by a third."

Wow, thought I. If it's a projected 30,000 now, then that's an impressively accurate original estimate: "Yah," sez General "Five Pips" G.C. Scott, "We can dust these rag-heads with 22,500 troops. That's assuming a Bell Curve, of course, so the first sigma is 7200 troops either way. Oh, and we also need a nuclear fireball over Peshawar, just in case."

Apparently this level of cogency is beyond either the US military or the UK journo frat-boys. We're led to believe that the original troop target was 20,000, which would make the proposed increase ... er ... I'll have to take the girlfriend's shoes and socks off to work this one out.

Not because it's necessary, of course. Just because criticising cloth-eared mathematical incompetence is less important to me in these benighted days.

Stats, pouf! Even static dynamics, I'm not so sure about. Occasionally, I worry about Pure Maths ... but it's probably thirty years too late to do anything about that.

Five to one, baby; one in five

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Damn this software.

Switched to administrator role in order to do obscene things with drivers, and forgot to add the tag-line.

Life gets more difficult by the byte (or, indeed, the nibble).

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

That would be "static mechanics."

I'm going to have to think before I type.

But what am I saying? A combination of ignorance and complete lack of forethought has served both the Government and the Civil Service ... not to mention the Judiciary ... well, so far; and I am but a humble subject.

Well, fuck those people.

I was wrong.