Women Wrestlers and Arbitraging Financial Markets

Women wrestlers and arbitraging financial markets was interesting. I was hoping to hear more about Xena the warrior princess than Stacy Kibler (who by all looks shouldn’t be a professional wrestler). In the beginning of the chapter, the author attempts to predict the winner of DWTS2 by tracking the spike in Internet traffic. His research resulted in predicting Stacy Kibler would win, followed by Drew Lachey and then Jerry Rice. The actual results were Drew Lachey, Jerry Rice, and Stacy Kibler. Of course this through the author into a frenzy of trying to figure out what he did wrong. He concluded that by judging popular opinion, that was only half of the result as the judges provide the other half of the result. Second, a phone voter may not represent the same demographic than an internet voter. Tancer then concluded that he had to “weed” out some of the searches who were just looking for photos on unrelated DWTS sites such as “World of Wrestling.”

Tancer then goes on to arbitrage unemployment claims and real estate property values. With real estate property values, he gets bitten by the “Stacy Kibler coefficient.” Based upon internet activity, he predicted that homes sales were going to increase; actually, worried home owners were doing more searches concerned about the value of their home than people actually interested in buying homes.

Great quote on page 169 applicable to many things. “It has become very clear that the data is always right, but pitfalls exist in how we interpret it, from gleaning insight into search terms to knowing the difference between search intent and actual behavior.”