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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Personal Contingency Planning
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To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (279)5/4/1998 11:21:00 AM
From: Bill Ounce  Read Replies (1) of 888
 
re: humorous statistical sampling methodology

Is this supposed to be a joke?

>>>I did a random sampling of some people here on SI and they all seem to have stock portfolios. [...] Therefore, I must conclude that all this talk about a sizable portion of Americans not having any savings to speak of is a myth. <<<

Ummm. You wish to make a conclusion about typical Americans in general, but you are very likely sampling non-typical Americans.

(1) SI is an Internet site. Most Americans do not yet have Internet access. So, surfing profiles on the net does not constitute a valid sample selection. Decades ago, there was a (now infamous) poll that boldly predicted the wrong victor for a presidential election. Their problem was that they used the telephone for sampling before it became ubiquitous.

(2) SI's main focus is tech stocks (any guess why is it called talk.techstocks.com). This makes it even a worse sample set for typical Americans than the Internet in general.

P.S. as a bit of fun, I started a thread about another popular "investment", Beanie Babies. (https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=17715) It's gotten zero responses. Perhaps everyone on SI is too busy talking about stocks :-)
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