Musings on Markets

JANUARY 31, 2025

While there has been chatter about DeepSeek for weeks, it became publicly accessible at the end of last week (ending January 24), and within hours, was drawing rave reviews from people well versed in tech, as it matched beat ChatGPT at many tasks, and even performed better on scientific and math queries.

Valuation

The Big Picture

JULY 1, 2025

I took a lot of math classes. I couldn’t give up math in computer science. For, for, and yet all the medical schools seem to be filled Velina Peneva : Exactly. But for me, this was not an option. And what I decided to do is just experiment and see what else I could do. And I’m pretty mathematically oriented.

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

MARCH 24, 2025

Calculation: BEA Table 3.1 Line 20 (Current Expenditures) divided by Table 1.1.5 Line 1 (GDP). Alternatively, Item #2 below divided by GDP. “ If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything. ” – Ronald Coase Hey, it’s @TBPInvictus. investment firm.

Investments

CFO Talks

JANUARY 29, 2025

My family wanted me to do medicine as i was good at both math’s and science, but finance was where my heart was. I used to have a very good teacher, very passionate about the subject and our class used to excel in accounting. It was then that i new finance was my go-to carrier choice.

CFO

The Big Picture

JUNE 23, 2025

It’s sort of like math with dollar signs attached to it. It was about, you know, I love math statistics, all that stuff. Steve Laipply : So I had a good friend who said, Hey, I’m taking finance. I really like it. Maybe give it a shot. I took a finance class, really liked it a lot. I really enjoyed it. I was hooked.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)

Barry Ritholtz

MARCH 1, 2025

Or why we need less math in music theory. ( That would be absurd, no? Each sentence should have its own organic length, unconnected to what came before or goes after. So why doesnt our music do that? The Honest Broker ) Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Melissa Smith of J.P.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

MAY 1, 2025

Compounding, Denominator Blindness, Survivorship Bias all affect our abilities to make good decisions about the future when even basic math is involved. What are some examples of bad numbers? You write, Forecasts of a recession arriving during the next four years are just a waste of print and pixels.

Investments

The Big Picture

JULY 17, 2025

It won’t take very much math to put the effect of tariffs into a broader context. I wanted to drop a quick note regarding some recent CPI data and tariffs. There is a fundamental misunderstanding (aka political spin) about the impact of tariffs. And, more than half of that is Services spending.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

APRIL 8, 2025

00:31:40 [Speaker Changed] So there’s the emotions and then there’s the math, right? I, you know, I, I do do the math when I, when I do some of my, my chats with the younger folks on the, on the team and I say, okay, real growth inflation term premium, you see this thing, it’s been zero or negative for the last 15 years.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)

The Big Picture

JULY 15, 2025

Obviously math, there’s a ton of symbolic logic wherever you look, that classic syllogism, right? I find, you know, I was always in high school, my favorite math was, was geometry because everything was a puzzle to me. Absolutely. Here’s the fact pattern, here’s the applicable Absolutely. How do you solve the problem?

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

MAY 7, 2025

I couldnt figure out where it came from; so I worked out the canonical math. It didn’t matter how I did it, whether I balanced monthly or quarterly or annually, or I use thresholds. Year after year, that 5%, some years it was 4%, some years was 7%, but averaged around 5%.

Finance

Barry Ritholtz

JANUARY 21, 2025

But the numbers you can’t argue with, I mean, we all know that the brutal math of investing before costs investors collectively will earn the market return after costs. They will earn that market return less, whatever they’re paying.

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

FEBRUARY 17, 2025

And I did a lot of options math, which I thought was interesting. Which was interesting because I actually started my career at JP Morgan Asset Management in the high yield and investment grade credit research team. 00:07:26 And then I moved on to the equities team afterwards. And I just learned a tremendous amount.

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

MARCH 17, 2025

Wasn’t the Excel spreadsheet error, which changed their math. Problem is, the math doesn’t work 01:20:33 [Speaker Changed] Well, you know, math, who really believes numbers should add up. I mean that was, that was the problem. The problem is Japan is running two 50%. And their economy seems to be doing just fine.

Budgeting

The Big Picture

JUNE 16, 2025

Yeah, you have to, you know, the conceit of finance is that basically the math is all there is to it. So you mentioned half math, half Shakespeare. Let’s talk about the math side. Ivanka said, oh no, you don’t have to be able to do math to do real estate 00:20:13 [Speaker Changed] Or investing for that math.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

MAY 13, 2025

00:16:36 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I’m, I’m not gonna check your math on that, but I’ll, I’ll buy Eric saying your, your estimate there on what we’ve saved investors over time. I think we could ballpark it closer to $2 trillion. And I think the focus on cost has been relentless.

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

MAY 6, 2025

Sander Gerber : Well, actually I was good at math. Because if you don’t include every single data point, then in the matrix math you have a divide by zero issue. Barry Ritholtz : So let’s start a little bit with your background. Bachelor’s in Humanistic philosophy and an MBA from Wharton Finance.

Profit and Loss

The Big Picture

JUNE 2, 2025

And when I went there I was gonna be a lawyer and I was gonna major in mathematics and I took my freshman year math and that all went great. And it turned out that half of that class had been the US National Math team and they had all competed internationally and they knew stuff I didn’t.

Forecasting

Barry Ritholtz

APRIL 1, 2025

He, like, he stopped doing math and science when he was like seven years old. So that I wouldn’t, I mean, Dave has more, those characters are not characters I would’ve naturally sought out. They are characters. So as he puts it, he, he, he was like, he has no scientific aptitude. And he’s a poet at heart.

Investments

Barry Ritholtz

NOVEMBER 23, 2024

New York Times Magazine ) • Wall Street Math Wizards Are Decoding Private-Market Returns : A small band of quants is shining a light into the shadowy world of unlisted assets. But It Is Fighting Back. As revolutionary new weight-loss drugs turn consumers off ultraprocessed foods, the industry is on the hunt for new products. (

Concentration

Nerd's Eye View

APRIL 2, 2025

Retirement planning, then, isn't just about getting the math right to work out between the client's desired spending level and their income and assets available, nor is it about achieving the highest Monte Carlo score. It's about developing a dynamic spending plan (e.g.,

Marketing

Barry Ritholtz

DECEMBER 18, 2024

” A bit of quick math: 726,600/0.987 = 736,170 (starting point). Journal (restaurant) reporter who inappropriately used non-seasonally adjusted numbers to make the following claim : “California had 726,600 people working in fast-food and other limited-service eateries in January [2024], down 1.3% 726,600 – 736,170 = -9,570.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

JANUARY 5, 2025

Institute for New Economic Thinking ) Insurance and Taxes Now Cost More Than Mortgages for Many Homeowners : Ballooning expenses rewrite the math of homeownership. This December, Ohanian retracted his claim; Hoover retracted 8 additional Ohanian claims.

Math

CFO Talks

JULY 29, 2025

I have always enjoyed Math and Accounting in school, my dad was a bookkeeper and I think this is where it started. I spend my first hour getting my kids and myself ready, my son for school, myself for work, and getting my daughter dressed although she is 2.5 and not at school yet. What sparked your interest in finance?

CFO

Barry Ritholtz

JULY 21, 2023

Call it ” ‘ America’s Enormous Math Mistake’s Mistake. Since 2008, the Census Bureau has included government transfers in its Supplemental Poverty Measure. seconds to find 253,000,000 results on Google showing exactly how the government measures this. ” Was this ignorance? Wiifull misrepresentation? Sheer stupidity?

Math

PYMNTS

JANUARY 8, 2021

Rigorous Math Vs. Calendar Gazing. So the math to match supply and demand has to be very, very rigorous. Each asset had its supply-demand math done perfectly. “Coming out of this, I would imagine that health systems will become much more analytical and rigorous about how they think through capacity,” he predicted.

Math

Corporate Finance

MARCH 6, 2024

And while the video does a good job of explaining option basics, it also discusses some of the beauty behind the math. A really interesting Veritasium video walks through a brief history of options and the mathematics behind the Black-Scholes model.

Math

PYMNTS

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Walmart watchers are out in force today with the launch of subscription service Walmart+. While it has been widely touted as a hedge against Amazon Prime’s runaway growth, when the two programs are stacked side by side, something doesn’t add up.

Math

CFO News

MARCH 7, 2023

In the February budget, the central government marked down the disinvestment target to ₹50,000 crore from ₹65,000 crore budgeted initially. It has managed to raise ₹31,107 crore so far.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

OCTOBER 20, 2023

Whether it’s a few decades or a century, the math works the same. Hey, what a very different outcome than suggesting a loss of purchasing power — if you understand money and math, you have actually gained purchasing power. And over the past few centuries, those returns have greatly exceeded inflation.

Investments

CFO News

DECEMBER 20, 2023

High GST boosts government revenue, aiding fiscal health, infrastructure, and social programs, enhancing economic stability and investor confidence.

Math

CFO News Room

DECEMBER 15, 2022

One seventh-grade math teacher at the school livestreams to the three other schools daily and travels to those schools for in-person instruction once a week. and Edgenuity Inc.

Numbers

CFO News

OCTOBER 3, 2023

As opposed to the DGGI calculation, the prospective taxation method suggested by the GST Council in August on "deposits" would lead to tax liability increasing by about 400% on a yearly basis, the executives added.

Math

PYMNTS

AUGUST 12, 2016

The coming ascendence of augmented reality and virtual reality have long been article fodder for tech enthusiasts, gamers and retail watchers alike. And for good reason – the story of virtual and augmented reality makes for some great copy.

Math

The SaaS CFO

JUNE 4, 2019

Mix multi-year contracts, discounts, and churn into your internal pricing discussion, and you need a degree in math to determine the optimal pricing for you and your customer. SaaS Multi-year Pricing Discounts SaaS pricing can be a pretty complex subject.

Math

CFO News

AUGUST 9, 2023

A minimum 50% domestic value addition (DVA) is a key condition for companies to qualify for subsidies under the scheme. The intention is to promote local manufacture of new technology products such as electric vehicles (EV) rather than subsidising imports.

Math

Barry Ritholtz

JUNE 9, 2024

The Journal did the math as follows: California had 726,600 people working in fast-food and other limited-service eateries in January, down 1.3% UPDATING: Spent some time investigating the origins of Manzo’s NY Post claim and found myself (suprise!) from last September, when the state backed a deal for the increased wages.

Math