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http://www.vcconfidential.com/2007/0...ch-inform.html
Some of you may have seen this from my shared feed. I thought it was pretty interesting and somewhat counter to the way a lot of people feel about investing. It specifically made me think about someone like Barron, that chooses to use tons of data.
One interesting note is that the author talks about not only investments in small, relatively inefficient markets (venture capital), but also uses Warren Buffett as an example.
Perhaps Homer Simpson was right, "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!"
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the horse betting study was the best analogy in there and i think taleb used it as well.
what i do, fyi (evan et.al.) is to look at a ton of info and boil it down to the things that really matter to what i'm studying. like a filter.
for instance, when building a trading strategy that generates a signal, you need fo first have a ton of indicators based on economic data that determine that signal. the more info you use in indicators doesn't necessarily create a better system. using 10 indicators for a signal may be just as good or only marginally worse than using 50 or 100...just depends on the thing being created obviously.
the site you've shown does a good job of explaining why an overload of info could be bad and even make you think you're doing a better job than you would be able to do otherwise with less info.
good cite.
Barron