845 karma · joined November 8, 2013
blm.io
@benjaminlmoore
Time is not evidence of safety, that is an odd claim (see smoking tobacco), thankfully we have the scientific method to investigate hypotheses like "x is bad for you".
1. There's no way to hedge against inflation (you didn't know TIPS existed)
2. Having learned about TIPS you assert they're illiquid and can't be traded easily (you didn't know about TIPS funds)
3. Having learnt about TIPS funds you don't the recent returns of a specific fund (you don't know that TIPS adjustments lag reported inflation numbers)
See also: treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS).
Aside: to those who enjoyed reading this annual letter I recommend "The Essays of Warren Buffett" — an arranged collection of edited previous letters by theme (though they are all also freely available online).
Edit: actually I managed to click through to find this screenshot: http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)
Decomposition of time series is done with STL (stl function in stats package) and this is the first part of what they call "Seasonal Hybrid ESD (S-H-ESD)" (sounds impressive right?) which then apparently just involves taking the max absolute difference from the detrended sample mean in terms of standard deviations, remove it and repeat until you have your collection of x outliers. If they wanted to this could be explained in a few sentences, and the underlying code is really simple [0], but for whatever reason it's been written up as advanced analytics — as if decomposing a time series is a major challenge.
[0] https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection/blob/master/R/de...
IAR can be and indeed is invoked all the time, making Wikipedia a bad example of how strict rule adherence stifles a community. It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.