Economic Rigor

Time for another Market Risk Premium update. ASX200 average returns over the last 2 years = 1.857% p.a (Pretty lean returns) Dividend Yield average over the last 2 years = 4.4875% p.a Therefore, leaves the ASX200 total return at a pretty ordinary 6.34%. Better than a bank account I suppose, but still not great. Risk free rate (average 10 year bond rate) = 2.52% Therefore the market risk premium is 6.34-2.52 = 3.82% Its positive, but below the 5 year average average of 5.07% I will estimate that it needs to come up a bit this year.

All this talk about Women in Tech due to an un-name Google engineer daring to suggest that the reason why there is a gender gap  in companies like Google is because women aren't interested in tech careers. I must admit, I sort of agree. If you look at the current stats about university courses and the gender divide, it looks pretty grim reading if you want the gender gap to get smaller. Generally, the path to tech requires either an IT related degree, or an Engineering related degree. Thankfully the ABS records details of the people studying those types of degree. Lets have a look at the aggregate percentages over the years in Australia In 2016, there are 271,037 people studying in either an IT field or an Engineering Field Of those, 244,493 are male (90%). Only 26,544 are female (10%) In 2006, there were 228,300 people studying in wither an IT field or an Engineering Field. The percentages were then 13% female, 87% male. So it has gotten a lot worse in 10 years. If i...

Not sure what has changed with the Apple Watch, but it has started to go gang busters. People must be liking the Series 2. See the graph below that is tracking Apple Sales based on my algorithm mentioned in earlier posts. After a shaky start, there has been continued growth in Apple Watch Sales over the last year. Cracked $2 billion in sales for the first time this quarter. Not bad.

ABC recently broadcasted a report detailing that there are domestic violence issues in Christianity. That sounded a bit dodgy to me, so I decided to do a regression analysis to see if it was true. Got the following data from NSW sources 1. Incidents of Domestic Violence in 2016 from BOSCAR by postcode http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Documents/RCS-Annual/PostcodeData.zip 2. Postcode census data in 2016 via DataPacks https://datapacks.censusdata.abs.gov.au/datapacks/  This gave me population data per postcode, median household income per postcode, Indigenous people per post code, Christian People per post code and finally Muslim people per postcode. 3. Using this info, I then created a data table which listed the domestic violence incidence per 10,000 people for each postcode. I also listed Indigenous people, Christian people and Islamic people per postcode as well. 4. I calculated the averages for each of these, including household income. Using these averages, I wa...

Growth in wages is pretty piss poor in Australia. And the sad reality is that real wage growth has hit a negative in 2017. Check out the graph below. As you can see, since 2013, wage growth has been pretty poor even though inflation has been minimal. Not sure whether there is an answer to wage growth improving.

PWC published a report today saying that they believe the unpaid Child Care Industry was worth $345 Billion a year. Which is a crazy figure. Would make unpaid child care the biggest industry in Australia. So I called Bullshit and decided to do some analysis. My goal was to calculate what it would cost to put every child (0-5) in long day care, and every child (6-12) in before school and after school care. First, my assumptions. 1. There are 256 working days in the year. Weekends and Public Holidays would not require child care as it is expected that parents would do the caring. 2. Long Day care costs $100 per child, per day (is a NSW price so likely to be cheaper in other states) 3. Before School/After School care costs $66 a day (is a NSW price so likely to be cheaper in other states 4. Number of children in Australia are accurately counted by the ABS (which is where I am getting my numbers) Calculations In Australia, no of kids aged 0-5 = 1,871,741 Cost of day care...

Been doing some digging around for incarceration statistics to see if Immigrants are as big a source of crime as Trump specifies. Not sure whether it is as big an issue as he claims. I started my analysis with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which publishes an annual report of jail stats. Includes a table of non-citizen prisoners. In 2015 - the stats were as follows... Non-Citizen prisoners by Federal and State Jurisdictions = 65,107 Total Number of Prisoners in Federal and State Jurisdictions = 1,526,792 So pretty small percentage, right? Well not so fast. That number does not include Californian numbers, which don't publish non citizen prisoner stats. Going back to 2011, when California did publish these stats, we worked out that California had around 10.9% of its prisoner population to be non-citizen. Extrapolating that to 2015 (10.9% of 2015 California prisoner population of  129,593), means we have an estimated California non-citizen jail population of ...