Did you just link to the change in the housing market over the past year? Washington Post:
D.C.’s median sale price soared to $460,000 from $405,000 in March 2012, an increase of 13.6 percent year over year. (sic)
My link:
Sold: $445,000 in May 2004
He would prefer to own if it made financial sense. “I expect we’ll probably end up buying again, but only when prices adjust,” Baker says.
Let’s subtract the $1000 he paid for the best argument against the existence of a housing bubble. On the face of it, you appear to be arguing with a man who made $39,000 cash by betting on the obvious—though the actual number may of course be less.
Your general argument seems to deny the usefulness of hedging.
Did you just link to the change in the housing market over the past year?
There is a multi-year graph of real estate prices on that web page, if you click the “Max” button you will get a plot of prices from August 2004 till today.
Your general argument seems to deny the usefulness of hedging
No, my general argument denies the usefulness of forecasts which don’t provide time estimates other than “at some point in the future”.
Let me offer you three more examples of such forecasts:
The website does work when I enable cookies, and it says he sold his apartment for much more than the median price. I think it also supports the claim that after buying a house, he had a profit left of roughly 10 percent of that house’s value (the amount of equity he supposedly said he wouldn’t mind losing post-purchase).
Your general argument seems to misrepresent Taleb. Again, we have here a case of someone doing pretty well by focusing on the predictions you can make. (His profit was likely sub-optimal, but that sounds like an example of a prediction you can’t make.) And hedging can indeed protect you against the events you keep weirdly suggesting are useless to think about.
Did you just link to the change in the housing market over the past year? Washington Post:
My link:
Let’s subtract the $1000 he paid for the best argument against the existence of a housing bubble. On the face of it, you appear to be arguing with a man who made $39,000 cash by betting on the obvious—though the actual number may of course be less.
Your general argument seems to deny the usefulness of hedging.
There is a multi-year graph of real estate prices on that web page, if you click the “Max” button you will get a plot of prices from August 2004 till today.
No, my general argument denies the usefulness of forecasts which don’t provide time estimates other than “at some point in the future”.
Let me offer you three more examples of such forecasts:
The stock market will go up 20%
The stock market will go down 20%
The stock market will stay flat for a while
The website does work when I enable cookies, and it says he sold his apartment for much more than the median price. I think it also supports the claim that after buying a house, he had a profit left of roughly 10 percent of that house’s value (the amount of equity he supposedly said he wouldn’t mind losing post-purchase).
Your general argument seems to misrepresent Taleb. Again, we have here a case of someone doing pretty well by focusing on the predictions you can make. (His profit was likely sub-optimal, but that sounds like an example of a prediction you can’t make.) And hedging can indeed protect you against the events you keep weirdly suggesting are useless to think about.
If I may point you to the first paragraph of this post..?
I don’t believe I said anything at all about what’s useful or useless to think about.