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

To: Night Trader who wrote (95629)	4/23/2002 4:31:47 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 132070

MK, You hit on one of my pet peeves. I go bonkers when somebody says to me "this fund does this or that" based upon past performance. No, that fund when it was $20 million in assets and managed by a smart guy may have done that then. But, now that it is $5 billion in assets and managed by a committee, the odds of it doing the same thing is very low. Heck, the odds aren't that high if it's still $20 million and managed by the same guy. I especially hate when they show me combinations of funds or money managers that "never lose money." My radar blips, "next disaster coming up." <g> It reminds me of an old CFA question, not to keep harping on that sad program. It compared two companies in the same industry, one well-established and financially strong with the other in more of a Single A credit sort of mode. We were supposed to recommend one of them, with the correct answer being the more conservative one. It was named Lilly and the single A was named Pfizer. Pfizer is now AAA and Lilly isn't because their analysis of the balance sheet and income statements was historical evidence, not predictive.