Data from the Wolrd Bank

There is a wealth of data-sets pretty much about every country in the world available for free from April 2010 by the World Bank. Data ranges from agricultural use, educational / medical standards to financial development indicators. I discovered this resource while looking for some macroeconomic data for one of my PhD experiments. Weirdly enough I ended up browsing the huge data-set for hours and had a great time discovering the various differences in education, health and economic production between countries. For example I found that people are very keen about education in Kazachstan, in certain years even more so than in France - play around by selecting different countries.

Arable land (% of land area)

Data from World Bank, Martin's Blog :-)

You can even compose cool widgets like the one above!

I personally most enjoy browsing the data by the actual available indicators and getting to know what they mean. I found this to be a great resource and hence had to share it with my readers and btw. there's also an API for any developers out there, looks pretty neat.

Other Institutions have also opened up much of their data-records:

• US Bureau of Labout Statistics
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the famous BEA)
• US Data.gov
• EU Eurostat
• OECD
• UK National Statistics

My favourite book on many of these indicators is the book by Richard Yamarone - I read parts of it and it is an enlightening read, Richard provides a complete view of each discussed indicator, it's history, it's derivations, computation and uses. Highly recommended!

My New Year's Blog revamp

With the new year I decided to change my blog-up a little bit. Essentially the design template is now different, not so heavy on the eyes I hope. Secondly the direct address changed to http://martinsykora.blogspot.com, alternatively http://www.martinsykora.com is still usable.

On a different note. Each month I receive an email from NBER (The National Bureau of Economic Research) with most recent summary of published/working papers by eminent economic academics. Often I just ignore these emails, this time I saw one article that caught my attention thought and I'd recommend it as a great read to anyone interested into the general research method within science. The paper is entitled "Economics, History and Causation" and the authors suggest that a number of qualitative reserch methods should be more at the centre of an overly statistical approach to economic research (in particular since authors are from that field, however their argument extends equally to the field of, say empirical computer science).

The paper can be downloaded here http://www.nber.org/papers/w16678.pdf

2011 - Obama's 3rd year in Office

I've came across several articles recently about the variation in US Presidential Politics ahead of re-election. The argument is simple; potentially unpopular policies and laws are passed at the beginning of a presiding government term as opposed to more popular laws towards the end of term so that the presiding government will stand better chances of re-election. This simple argument is based on the bias of recent memories, in other words, people tend to remember recent past better than what happened several years ago.

Below is a table summarising the S&P 500 annual changes in %: 1962-2010 (13 election terms):



Of course the amount of data we can rely on is statistically seen, tiny. Yet it provides some indication to a more positive performance, in the second half of the US Presidential term. Especially the 3rd year of a term, has historically seen much growth.

Stockmarket on the Rise

Shown is the FTSE-100 index over the past 2 years, as I am sure you can gather from the chart without much of Technical Analysis experience, there is now an uptrend / recovery ongoing. Since about July 2009 the capitalisation of UKs top companies increased by about 30%... pretty strong growth if you'd ask me! (actually this isn't growth as such, but the immediate prospect of financial failure probability rapidly having disappeared...)

See the 5 year chart here, to gain a fuller picture of where we are in terms of historical price behaviour.

Conclusion: Speaking from a Technical Analysis perspective, we can expect a rebound and further short term (1-3 month) growth in the market, i.e. 5300 to about 5600 points, thats about 6% growth in the immediate future with a potential to cash in on a good 10% growth in a more mid-term time frame!

Fundamentals aren't so interesting, but to be honest, compared to where we were a year ago (politically, economically,...), things are looking rather good! i.e. 1% economic growth, housing/morgage figures, (+)ve anticipation of general elections, ... on the other hand, the tax cuts are wearing off (VAT back to its old level), threatening taxes & regulation for investment/corporate banks...

...any comments, please feel free, I apologise for the moderation, but with all the spamming going on I am sure you understand. Thanks.

Web 2.0 Business Model

During my 'traditionally irregular' web surfing this morning, I came across a blog article that focussed on CRM (Customer Relationship Model) and how it will look under the use of web 2.0 concept.

The diagram above is self explanatory - hint, read from the top (customers form partnerships & and provide self-service) to the bottom right (community generated collective intelligence), and go back up on the left side of the diagram.

I like this diagram because it is simple illustration of not just customer intelligence but the general web 2.0 model (with a little imagination of-course). Youtube or flickr are basically based on this model. I am convinced that many more companies with these simple models will follow the example of illustratory stock start ups. Something to keep in mind in many ways when valuing businessess.

News Tweeting

I never really followed the Twitter.com phenomenon. I did join up thought and have had an account for some time now. I remember when twitter was still in its obscurity, not many people knew about it and I thought what a funny concept to share one line thoughts with random web surfers. 

Recently a study by Pear Analytics classified twitter talk and discovered, based on their statisticall classification that around 40% of all twitter posts is pointless blabber, they also found that the count of poststwhich could possibly be classed as news related was minimal (below 10%). 

Chris Matyszcyk submitted an interesting opinion. He suggests that the blabber itself is off value to many people and is actually quite usefull way of accumulating new knowledge. See for yourself, on his blog.

Interesting I thought... any opinions welcome, just drop me an email or comment!!

Recession RECOVERY is here!!!

French & German GDP figures for the second quarter show it clearly - black on white, finally the economic growth substantiated. Technically this means Germany and France are out of the recession, yuppiii, yep yey, you might think.

This is not quite the case thought. It seems most of the growth was spawned by govermental rescue packages and incentives that initiated good levels of consumer spending (i.e. old car exchange incentives). Export levels in germany have indeed increased, however imports have fallen which in fact inflates the GDP figure with a certain uncertainty.

Let us hope the largest shrinking of worldwide economies is over soon, but maybe getting too excited too quickly will be a mistake.

News never settles down...

When rivals battle it out, news never tends to settle into the stock prices that much. In my post from Wednesday, July 8, 2009, I mentioned that Google is planning to develop an operating system and this might be strongly perceived as a long term risk to Micrsoft (as this is Microsofts core business). Since then, Microsoft has announced that it will offer Office application online and for free from 2010, further it seems that a yahoo takeover by Microsoft is agressively in the making.

J. O'Neil, the well known author and investor states that in his investigations he has found that usually news, as it comes out, creates an effect on the prices over an arbitrary period, however within some time price always tends to return to the a-priori (before) news price. Googles plans are hence maybe not so real towards microsoft shares as some people might want to think.

With Microsoft I would currently expect a drop in share prices over next few weeks. Factors: yahoo take over, Google's plans, smaller revenues if Office is to be offered for free. However over the longer term (months and next few years) I can see Microsoft on a steady footing, as Google's threat is really just more psychological than real, and Microsoft has other profitable branches that show a lot of promise, unless hindered by monopoly regulation.

Tech Companies...

According to news released yesterday, GOOGLE is planning to built an open source operating system under the name GOOGLE Chrome OS (following its successful free Chrome browser). The OS will be based on a UNIX kernel, it will however be build from the ground up. Some speculate this could have a drastic negative effect on Microsoft shares over future years.

GOOGLE certainly represents a very capable and potentially extremely dangerous competitor, especially if it taps into Microsofts' core products' business revenues.