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A comment on Stocks post best annual gain in 6 years with the S&P 500 surging more than 28%. Parent comment

Re:Stocks post best annual gain in 6 years with the S&P 500 ... by perl4ever on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @07:21PM (#21925755)
Average volatility (annualized) of the stock market has been about 14% historically, and sometimes goes up to 30%.

So I don't think that a 28% return in a year is enough to say definitively that stocks are up. It can easily be random noise.

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Re:Stocks post best annual gain in 6 years with the S&P 500 ... by tempsy on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @01:01AM (#21926871)
It’s up.
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Re:Stocks post best annual gain in 6 years with the S&P 500 ... by perl4ever on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @01:37AM (#21926949)
Somebody said that in an efficient market prices are within a factor of two of correct. People are so caught up in the fact that we have prices of everything to fractional pennies every microsecond, that they can't conceive of just how much is false precision.

Can't you begin by admitting that there is some uncertainty, that every price implicitly has some +/- amount associated? And next, consider that when an entire company is purchased, it usually costs a lot more than the immediately prior trading price, showing that separately from uncertainty, there is a big range between different shareholders?

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