It will be a cold day in hell before we do that again, you can be sure.
The reaction was complicated by my typing "Why would there be an significant and highly positive correlation between dealer survival and Clinton donors?"
I didn’t mean "statistically significant," but that was all it took. A number of blogs fixated on this sentence and ignored the next two, "Granted, that P-Value (0.125) isn’t enough to reject the null hypothesis at 95% confidence intervals (our null hypothesis being that the effect is due to random chance), but a 12.5% chance of a Type I error in rejecting a null hypothesis (false rejection of a true hypothesis) is at least eyebrow raising. Most statistians would not call this a "find" as 95% confidence intervals are the gold standard for this sort of work." You can imagine the result.
As a measure of how partisan this issue is, both sides of the aisle had it out over sentence structure all day. We were severely chastised (in my case rightly so) and that was further complicated by my posting without explanation, the results of six regressions absent any narrative about our experimental design, our order of testing and the like. This subjected us to "data fishing" criticisms. (Probably warranted to some small degree- though some readers went so far to accuse us of outright fraud). What began as an attempt to give our readers some transparency devolved into a mess of sound bytes. The fault is entirely mine for expecting civil peer review or anything like it in such a forum. A mistake I shall not repeat with early findings again.
The slew of email I received ranged from "thanks" to "you are the spawn of the devil." The latter is the obviously closest to the truth, so we are sending that reader the Marla Singer Stolen Jeans prize. His name was Robert Paulson.
We planned to release the data publicly today, but we are having second thoughts about that particular plan.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.