Errata: Known Errors in "Foundations for Scientific Investing"

## 6th Edition (November/December 2016) with ISBN 978-0-9941386-2-0

### Errors/Corrections

• On p. 75, "...in the second half of the year, the product of moments will almost always be negative." should instead say "positive."
• On p. 78, 380.3 should be 382.3 in the Quant Quiz.
• On p. 87, X bar on line 5 should be R bar, as in the first line of the equation following.

## 5th Edition (January 2016) with ISBN 978-0-9941182-9-5

### Errors/Corrections

• On p.53, in footnote 19, "numerator" should be "denominator."
• On p.54, two-thirds of the way down the page, m_n should be m_k to match the power in the summation.
• On p.56, the last sentence in the box is incorrect. The t does display peakedness relative to a normal distribution with the same mean and variance. There are similar mis-statments on 49, 313, 314.
• On p.117, the middle paragraph starting "Is there a bias..." needs to be struck out because \bar R_G is not a continuously compounded return. The surrounding text is correct.
• On p.120 "randomness in u" should be "randomness in z_n"
• On p.198 I say that stock trades settle T+3 in NZ and the US. On March 7, 2016, however, the NZX and the ASX moved to T+2 settlement. The US aims to have T+2 settlement in place by the third quarter of 2017. Note that this affects the dividend timeline in Figure 2.13: the ex-date is now only one business day prior to the record date.
• On p.234 the square root sign on Eqn 2.68 should not be there.
• On p.325 on the third line "r_k>r_j>r_i" should be "k>j>i".
• On p.368, second paragraph, "more than four times" should now be "about four times" because KiwiSaver AUM grew to about NZD30b at the end of 2015, and the exchange rate at that time was roughly 1.5NZD per USD.
• On p.420 in the second line of the bullet point strike out "market capitalization," as this is not correct.
• On p.421 the two references to Fama and French 2015 are meant to be 2015a, though it makes little difference.

## 4th Edition (September 2015) with ISBN 978-0-9941182-2-6

### Errors/Corrections

• On p. 425, 488 Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor is reported as being first published in 1973, but it should be 1949.
• On p. 177 it says that as of 2015 the NZX has no designated market makers. In fact, during 2015 the NZX introduced designated market makers for their SmartShares ETFs (Craigs Investment Partners as DMM), and for the NXT market (which has a single stock, GGL, trading so far) (First NZ Capital as DMM).
• On p. 394 the aside about Dow's 1986 index is incorrect. My description refers to the transportation average, not the industrials.

## 3rd Edition (December 2014) with ISBN 978-0-9941182-0-2/978-0-9941182-1-9

### Errors/Corrections

• Page 6 Seven lines up from the bottom. "per capital" should be "per capita". Page 22 Second line. "chariman" should be "chairman". Page 28 Footnote, "2014" should be "2014a". Page 99 8 lines down from top, differnt should be different. Page 105. $336.675 should be$336.8425. Page 150 middle of page "exceeds their ask price" should be "exceeds the mid-spread price". Page 200 \delta_P appears twice in the middle of the page and it should be \delta_B in both cases. Page 208 alpha=IT.omega should be alpha=IR.omega. Page 228 "The upside potential remains, it is just at a high level of risk." should be "The upside potential remains, at the same level of risk, but at a higher level of expected return." Page 287 "As stock prices fall, so does the leverage in a market-value balance sheet..." should obviously be "As stock prices fall, the leverage rises in a market-value balance sheet..." Page 323 seven lines up from the bottom "the fund not hold" should be "the fund does not hold". Page 408 footnote 6 "does go through the vertex" should be "does not go through the vertex".
• Page 55. Footnote 19 has been accidentally suppressed. It reads: "Ruppert (1987) provides an excellent discussion of kurtosis and the relative importance of peakedness and fat tails individually and in concert. Kurtosis is not just about peakedness and kurtosis. For example, Banerjee, Dai, Lesmond, and Noe (2014) discuss a positive association between kurtosis and liquidity costs."
• Page 446. "Peter Rothchild" should be "John Rothchild"
• The discussion in Section 2.3.6 (DDM III) is not clear. Yes, if a stock does not pay dividends, then a plain vanilla DDM that begins with, say D0, and then grows it through time, will fail to model firm value. A multiple-stage DDM can, however, easily accommodate a stock that does not currently pay dividends. There can be a first stage with no dividends, a second stage of transition, and a third perpetual stage with average dividend payout. This model will be a model of growth in EPS, with different levels of dividend payout over time.

## 1st Edition of Q&A Book (December 2014) with ISBN 978-0-9941038-7-1

### Errors/Corrections

• Page 8 Question 16: the word "purchase" is missing from the end of answer (d), and as it stands answers (a), (b), (c), and (d) all appear to be correct. So, answer (e) should read "None of the above is false."
• Page 54 Question 140: as it stands answer (d) is the only one that is false. So, either answer (d) reading "6 pennies" should be changed to read "5 pennies", or the solution should be changed from (e) (none of the above is false) to (d) (which is false as it stands).
• Page 98 Question 236: This question is internally inconsistent. Both (a) and (c) are correct answers. The argument is that long-term investors recognize that they must face exposure to the broad equity market to build wealth. So, if we take that as given, then we end up building a model where we attempt to actively step away from the benchmark only if we think the return justifies the risk and the T-costs. That model (i.e., our active alpha optimization) does not include the benchmark return and risk as a function of our choice variables because we take these actions regardless of, and not needing a forecast of, the direction of the market.

## 2nd Edition (August 2014) with ISBN 978-0-9941038-4-0

### Errors/Corrections

• Typographical errors:
• Page 104. middle of page. "a significant coefficients" should be "all significant coefficients"
• Page 134. Four lines from the bottom, in Footnote 22, "TTM" is repeated.
• Page 143. "ask if $10.05" should be "ask is$10.05";
• Page 196. In Footnote 55 the word "average" is missing just before the first comma in the last sentence;
• Page 370. "stocks returns" shoudl be "stock returns" seven lines into Section 4.2.10
• Page 438. Lee 1996 is out of order in the references;
• Page 440. "Peter Rothchild" should be "John Rothchild"
• Page 47: For improved clarity, six lines up from the bottom of the page, "Of course, the ratio can be quite large..." should instead be "Of course, the ratio (chisquared_nu/nu)/(chisquared_eta/eta) can be quite large..."
• The discussion in Section 2.3.6 (DDM III) is not clear. Yes, if a stock does not pay dividends, then a plain vanilla DDM that begins with, say D0, and then grows it through time, will fail to model firm value. A multiple-stage DDM can, however, easily accommodate a stock that does not currently pay dividends. There can be a first stage with no dividends, a second stage of transition, and a third perpetual stage with average dividend payout. This model will be a model of growth in EPS, with different levels of dividend payout over time.
• Page 226: Footnote 84 has disappeared in a software error. It should say "A collar is where you already own the stock, and you sell a high-strike call option, thereby giving up the upside potential, and you use the proceeds to buy a low-strike put option, thereby protecting yourself from the downside risk. Properly matched, it can be a zero-cost collar."
• Page 259: a word is missing nine lines from the top of the page "...undervalued securities." should be "...undervalued (overvalued) securities."

## 1st Edition (January 2014) with ISBN 978-0-9941038-0-2 (Soft Cover) or ISBN 978-0-9941038-3-3 (Hard Cover)

### Errors/Corrections

• Page 50. "reflected about its mean" should be "reflected about its median" because the mean does not exist.
• Page 55. "magnitude greater than about 2% occur more frequently" should be "magnitude greater than about 2.5% occur much more frequently" and "magnitude less than about 2% occur less frequently" should be "less than about 1.5% occur more frequently" That is, there is extra probability mass near the peak of the distribution (relative to a normal), and extra probability mass in the tails of the distribution (relative to a normal).
• Page 99. V(alpha) should be V(alpha hat), the variance of the estimator of the mean.
• Page 143. "lift their quotes" and "lower their quotes" need to be transposed.
• Page 176. "MIN-UTIL-OBJ.XLS" should be "MAX-UTIL-OBJ.XLS," and the reference to it in the second to last paragraph on the page should say "...if you maximize utility by varying..."
• The discussion in Section 2.3.6 (DDM III) is not clear. Yes, if a stock does not pay dividends, then a plain vanilla DDM that begins with, say D0, and then grows it through time, will fail to model firm value. A multiple-stage DDM can, however, easily accommodate a stock that does not currently pay dividends. There can be a first stage with no dividends, a second stage of transition, and a third perpetual stage with average dividend payout. This model will be a model of growth in EPS, with different levels of dividend payout over time.
• Typographical errors: "140" should be "185" in the Job Interview Question box on p8; "peak" should be "peek" two lines up from the bottom of p22; "Simlated" should be "Simulated" in the graph title on p57; the second "then one run of one tail" should be "then one run of one head" on p91; "confident" should be "confidence" on 8th line of text, p93; "$2,801,309.95" should be "$2,801,302.95" as carried over from Equation 2.12 on the previous page; "ask if $10.05" should be "ask is$10.05" on p137; "held in pension assets" should be "held in managed funds" on p297; "though" and "exaple" should be "thought" and "example" five lines up from the bottom of p224; WisomTree.com should be WisdomTree.com on p339; "until about 2005" should be "until about 1995" on page 304;
• Note that Equation 2.54, on page 193, is correct as stated in reference to Question B.2.2, but more generally you need to introduce a scaling term in front of the stated T-costs term. Question B.2.2 assumes that you rebalance only once per annum, but if we were rebalancing B times per annum, we would multiply the stated T-costs term in Equation 2.54 by B (e.g., multiply the T-costs term by 12 if rebalancing monthly). That is because the alphas and the VCV have been scaled to be in annual terms, and the T-costs need to be similarly scaled so that they do not swamp, or get swamped by, the other terms in the objective function (Tajaddini, Crack, and Roberts, 2013). Another way to think about this is as follows. Suppose you rebalance daily, but that the first term in Equation 2.54 uses annualized alpha, and the second term uses an annualized VCV. As you step through time, you are always looking at annualized active return and annualized active risk, but if you keep the T-costs term as stated in Equation 2.54, then this is only the T-costs for that day, the T-costs will be very small, and that T-cost penalty may as well not be there, because it will be totally swamped by the active return and risk terms. Conversely, if we used alphas on a daily horizon, and a daily VCV, then you could leave the T-costs term as it is in Equation 2.54. Either way, the active returns, active risk, and T-costs need to be on the same time horizon scale.

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