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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Bakunin who wrote (78965)	4/4/2000 11:36:00 AM
From: BGR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Michael, Do you mean to say that you do not know JR from Adam, but nevertheless feel compelled to defend his reputation? Oh well. Now, every theory has to be tried out in practise to check for validity. Other than the superb performance, what, in your opinion, disqualifies the S&P500 from being the "market", as theorized by Markowitz? Sorry Michael, but for the last two decades since indexing has became more and more popular (and pensions funds have switched to indexing from active money management - are they simple folks too? ;-)) S&P500 has been the performance benchmark in use by an overwhelming majority of investors. Denying it is ostrich-like. Just look at a random sample of advertisements for fund companies. Academics may be simple folks - heck, all investors outside of active fund managers may be simple folks - but their postulate sure outperfomed the active money managers, and w/o the benefit of hindsight. If you want to use some other index, propose which one you want to use. I hope the answer is not going to be either 1) none, active investing simply rules or 2) a cherry-picked index that has performed poorly (if you can find one, that is). International indices are OK, too. As for why I am switching from the S&P500 to the NASDAQ, what has that got to do with assessing JR's true performance!? Ad hominems wouldn't get you anywhere. -BGR.