Pontiac Dies

Last week, we all had to say goodbye to Pontiac. The General Motors brand had been suffering for the past few years with sluggish sales and little innovation for new design. The fact that GM had filed for bankruptcy hasn't helped either.

The NYT said, "For most of the 1960s, Pontiac ranked third in sales behind Chevy and Ford — a position now held by Toyota. But in the decades since, Pontiac’s edge and high-powered image wore off. Repeated efforts in the 1990s and 2000s to revive the brand failed. Drivers too young to remember the GTO came to associate Pontiac with models like the DustBuster-shaped Trans Sport minivan or the Aztek, a bloated-looking crossover widely regarded as one of the ugliest vehicles of all time. By early 2009, Pontiac had fallen to 12th place in the United States market, and its top-selling model was the G6, a sedan commonly found on car-rental lots."

Despite the success of the GTO in the muscle car era, Pontiac has struggled to maintain the edge and the high-powered image. It's interesting to look at a brand like this whose products were focused on image. It makes me wonder how long companies like Apple will be able to maintain success.

USF Microfinance Club Investment Potluck

The USF Microfinance Club is throwing a potluck during dead hour (from 5:30-6:30 pm) of November 10th. We have been making a lot of progress, and we are hoping you will bring a dish to celebrate with us!

We will be unveiling our new investment strategy and fund management tools, and we are also hoping everyone can bring a dish to celebrate.

Please let me know if you're interested in helping out at the event, and we are looking forward to seeing you!

Twitter Predicting the Stock Market

Last week there was a report that came out from Indiana University (see here), where researchers had come up with a method for predicting changes in the Dow Jones through an analysis of Twitter updates. The researchers analyzed 9.7 million tweets from March to December 2008 with the use of two mood-recording algorithms, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) and OpinionFinder.

What they found was that there were strong correlations between the moods and the movement in the market. Supposedly, there was a correlation between the "calmness" index (one of the six moods that was measured in GPOMS) and this could be used to predict whether the Dow Jones went up or down between 2-6 days later.

"We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%. "

Incredible? I think so too. Articles that I've read said that they need to do more research on this; however, the impact of social media is undeniable.