Results that are too good are simply implausible. But while these guys were stupid, they weren't evil.
In the recent Iranian elections, former jailed reporter Amir Taheri noted:
Mr. Ahmadinejad was credited with more votes than anyone in Iran's history. If the results are to be believed, he won in all 30 provinces, and among all social and age categories. His three rivals, all dignitaries of the regime, were humiliated by losing even in their own hometowns.
The statistical probability the sample variance is this small is effectively nil.
I don't want my own fatwa, but I'm skeptical. Perhaps this is a good marketing pitch for statistics professors. Even if you are an evil dictatorship, it pays to know some statistics!
4 comments:
Regarding the election, it seems to me that a 70% landslide would almost guarantee a win in all 30 provinces. It depends on how much each province looks like the overall country. The larger and more diverse a province is, the more it will go like the country.
A US presidential candidate that won 70% of the vote would win every state.
ugh. you're right.
Thats what you get when you hire incompetents on the cheap. The team who sorted the US in 2000 must have been available and well worth the money.
Entirely possible for a small fund to have a Sharpe of >= 2, as market making and arbitrage strategies will have very high Sharpe ratios. Of course, they're typically capacity-constrained, not scalable, and therefore not of interest to large institutional investors.
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