To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (47866 ) 10/13/2001 8:48:53 PM From: Pirah Naman Read Replies (2) | Respond to However, this doesn't mean that we can't take a candidate method, roll back the clock 5 years, apply it to a test company as it was then, and then roll the clock forward, repeating the test once a year or so, and see how the sequence of valuations corresponded to the actual history. Given the forum, we would want to do this for several gorillas of different types and then we would want to do it for other one-time candidate gorillas which obviously haven't made it. We would see how the analysis made the companies look in pre-bubble, more "normal" times and how the company was changed in appearance during the bubble. We would ask ourselves in this hindsight analysis whether we would have received the kind of buy or sell signals at appropriate times and we could model what responding to those signals would have meant to our investment in comparison with holding all the way through. years . Now you can choose to argue that any benefits gained by this could be coincidence. But if you do, acknowledge that the same can be argued for whatever benefits you have seen from any methods you have used. why practice on something which can't pass a test like this? Why adopt a method going forward which can't handle predicting the past? And, unless that test is made, how do I have any idea whether the numbers or signals it is giving me have any value?
