Investors beware: mining resource estimation methods give inconsistent results

After the Bre-X scandal in 1996, when fake measurements of gold wiped out billions of dollars in shareholder value of the Canadian mining company, the mining industry developed new standards for measuring mineral resources. While they are a vast improvement, the words and methods the industry uses to describe resources still leave room for the [...]

This time it’s different: stock market indicators

There is no shortage of indicators in the stock market. And anyone who can find reliable leading indicators that give reasonable predictions of what the markets are going to do in the future will quickly get very rich. Many people try—and fail. That does not mean there is necessarily anything wrong with the indicators themselves. [...]

No mean average-be careful of averages in indicators

People—and businesses—use averages all the time to measure performance.  Consciously or not, we use averages to make inferences about some underlying property of a population. For example, if Pine Crest School has higher averages than River Bank School, we infer that the “typical” student from Pine Crest is better than the typical student from River [...]

Why your customers may not see things the way you do

Are your customers experiencing something completely different from what your indicators tell you they are experiencing? Probably. Suppose a retail company with branches of different sizes measured some aspect of customer service in each of its branches, say wait times.  Will the average wait time be a good representation of the average customer’s experience? Take [...]