Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

Comments

  • Relevant to the recent comments on Bogle vs Templeton regarding taking words from these guys literally and as immutable. Problem with cults.

    I find the flawed calculation and ridiculous inference of Sperling's ROI on Clippers vs return on an index fund in the same period, a perfect symbolic example of M*'s GIGO methodology in its quant efforts. Can't M* find competent people to head its research?
  • But the miracle of indexing is the simplest miracle ever created. Think about it this way: There's a stock market out there that we all own together and it’s worth, say, $17 trillion today. So we draw that big circle. About 30 percent of it is owned by people who have figured it all out and they own the total stock market by owning everything in it and never trading. And those are the indexers. And index funds are about, I think, 33 percent of the market today, counting institutional and mutual fund investors.

    The other 67 percent of the investors are also indexers themselves as a group. They own the same stocks as the direct index investors. They just trade them back and forth with one another. So it is a mathematical impossibility that they will outperform those who go to indexing directly and buy a low-cost index fund.
    No. No its not.

    This proof irks me every time I see it.
  • edited May 2014
    Re: "Problem with cults"
    Sir John is probably rolling over in his grave at that remark.:-)
  • mrdarcey said:

    There's a stock market out there that we all own together and it’s worth, say, $17 trillion today. About 30 percent of it is owned by people who have figured it all out and they own the total stock market by owning everything in it and never trading. And those are the indexers. And index funds are about, I think, 33 percent of the market today, counting institutional and mutual fund investors.

    The other 67 percent of the investors are also indexers themselves as a group. They own the same stocks as the direct index investors. They just trade them back and forth with one another. So it is a mathematical impossibility that they will outperform those who go to indexing directly and buy a low-cost index fund.
    No. No its not.

    This proof irks me every time I see it.
    +++++++++++++
    @mrdarcy: Above, it seems like Bogle may be saying something similar to what Nobel Laureate William F. Sharpe said in his paper, "The Arithmetic of Active Management."
    His paper can be found here:
    stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

    Appreciate if you can explain the error here, and what it is that irks you.

    It's perfectly clear that a bunch of people are going to outperform the stock market, some by a wide margin. In what I think is Bogle's quote above, the "they" refers to the average of the entire group of active investors, not given individuals who are beating the market.

    In Sharpe's paper, he writes: "It is, of course, possible for the average professionally or institutionally actively managed dollar to outperform the average passively managed dollar, after cost. For this to take place, however, the non-institutional, individual investors must be foolish enough to pay the added costs of the institutions' active management via inferior performance."
    Close to the end of his paper, he writes: "To repeat: Properly measured, the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar, net of costs. Empirical analyses that appear to refute this principle are guilty of improper measurement."
    Earlier in the paper, he writes:
    If "active" and "passive" management styles are defined in sensible ways, it must be the case that
    (1) before costs, the return on the average actively managed dollar will equal the return on the average passively managed dollar and
    (2) after costs, the return on the average actively managed dollar will be less than the return on the average passively managed dollar
    These assertions will hold for any time period. Moreover, they depend only on the laws of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Nothing else is required.


  • @mrdarcey will provide his own rationale.

    The problem I have with these "zero sum game" arguments is that they assume the index literally contains every stock in the category which is not true of any index or in the case of Sharpe, the market is defined by him as only those stocks that are in the index and the active manager in his framework is constrained to only buy from those stocks.

    The reality is different as you can imagine. S&P 500 is only 500 stocks and the total stock market is only about 3000 and because of the selection criterion the latter overweights large caps in its composition. So there is a large umiverse of stocks that are not in the index. If the active manager buys stocks in his category (no style creep) that he believes are undervalued but not in the index at the time, the zero sum arithmetic argument assumptions don't apply. Sharpe has no results applicable to this case.

    Note that these arguments including Sharpe state that their conclusions follow only from arithmetic (of zero sum game) and not from empirical results of performance studies. But for that to be true, the active manager HAS to buy only those stocks that are in the index. A theoretical argument, not of much value in practice.

    Of course, indexologists explain away any over performance when an active manager overperforms with the equally fallacious argument that he picked stocks that were riskier (even if they are classified in the same category) than the index and therefore the index was not the right index for that fund!

    In other words, the average active managed dollar (not any particular manager) cannot win by definition in these theoretical framrworks.:-)
  • "So there is a large umiverse of stocks that are not in the index."
    ++++++++++++
    I'd like to understand this better.
    The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund has 3,684 stocks in it.
    By my estimation, it should contain the full universe of U.S. Mega caps, large caps, mid caps and small caps, and only be lacking some of the micro cap stocks in the market. It currently has 2.55% of it's stocks as microcap stocks, so I'm sure there are quite a few microcap stocks that it doesn't cover due to liquidity reasons and size constraints. But not a lot of mutual fund managers are purchasing stocks in the microcap universe.

    If you are correct, that the active managers are buying stocks that are not in the total market's 3,684 stock universe, then certainly it is true that the math stated by William Sharpe and Bogle does not apply. But I'm not convinced that a significant amount of microcap stock is being purchased to invalidate their arguments.
  • There are about 5000 stocks currently listed in US stock markets (though this keeps varying). Fund managers don't need to own only the stocks outside the index.

    For the "mathematical guarantee" of the zero sum game assumption to hold, you cannot have the fund managers owning ANY stock outside the index because the argument that the gains in any stocks held by the active manager is captured by the index itself and at the expense of another active manager doesn't hold.

    If a manager strikes rich with an IPO allocation or a distressed company coming out of bankruptcy, then it is not necessarily at the expense of any other manager because new value is being created. In fact, in the latter case, in theory, the gains could have come out of the losses in the index funds before that company was thrown out after locking in the losses!

    If a company held by an active manager is included in the index resulting in a pop in its price from the announcement, then the active manager realizes those gains not necessarily at the expense of any other manager nor is that gain captured by the index.

    Finally, by definition, the active managers must be fully invested with no cash for the zero sum assumption to hold. Otherwise, if the active managers, in theory, market time perfectly, and go to cash before a crash with the loss in value from such sales captured by everybody including the index funds, then the active managers can ALL beat the indices by staying out of the marker for the crash. The mathematical guarantee of zero sum game doesn't hold in this case.

    The point is that the theoretical framework in which this mathematical guarantee is provided doesn't model the real world but some theoretical unrealistic world with a lot of constraints on the managers and the definition of the market.

    Note that all of these arguments have nothing to do with whether managers can achieve this in reality or whether they under or over perform as measured empirically in some period. They claim to "prove" the average active dollar underperformance mathematically. Only IF the assumptions above model reality. Without it, they make no assertions one way or the other.
  • edited May 2014
    If a manager strikes rich with an IpO allocation or a distressed company coming out of bankruptcy, then it is not necessarily at the expense of any other manager because new value is being created.
    Nice.
  • The theory also sets up paradoxes that cannot be explained if you assume the total market index composition at any time captures the total market gains of all sub sectors.

    For example, imagine a hypothetical scenario in which all active managers conspire to put all of their money ONLY in the stocks owned by the small cap value index fund VISVX and hold it. This satisfies the theory assumptions. The average performance of the active managers will be the same as that of VISVX.

    This is a small subset of Total Stock Market index and so only a small proportion of those gains will be captured by the total market index. If the theory is correct, then it requires the rest of the stocks not in VISVX to NECESSARILY outperform or match VISVX stocks which is the only way for the returns on "active dollars" to be less than or equal to the total market. But there is no mathematical guarantee for that. Theory cannot explain this paradox.

    In reality, the opposite will likely happen as all the flow of money into VISVX stocks will keep it the best performance sector until the resulting increasing market caps will force the indices to restructure their holdings and so follow the conspiring active managers from sector to sector but never matching their performance!

    Indexology assumes that otherwise rational active traders knowingly continue to engage in a losing game in sufficient volume to create the price discovery that indexing requires to exist. If they all move to indexing as efficient markets and rational behavior would dictate, price discovery collapses and takes down the validity of indexing with it.:-)
  • rjb112 said:

    Appreciate if you can explain the error here, and what it is that irks you.

    It's perfectly clear that a bunch of people are going to outperform the stock market, some by a wide margin. In what I think is Bogle's quote above, the "they" refers to the average of the entire group of active investors, not given individuals who are beating the market.

    I read the Bogle quote as applying to individuals.

    Now Jack Bogle has always been very, very careful with his wording, so perhaps I shouldn't have. He's done an outstanding job reshaping the fund industry for retail investors, and made a lot of much deserved cash doing so. Absolutely, the math referring to the group as a whole means that the sum of those trades equals the index return (assuming all stocks are represented). Indices are often outstanding investment tools.

    But often that mathematical statement about groups is used to make assertions about individual investors and their potential outcomes. In doing so, people conveniently use the mathematics regarding the whole to make a faulty generalization about individuals (investors can't beat the market, except for those few who do...). That's where I get annoyed.

    So when Jack Bogle says:
    The other 67 percent of the investors are also indexers themselves as a group. They own the same stocks as the direct index investors. They just trade them back and forth with one another. So it is a mathematical impossibility that they will outperform those who go to indexing directly and buy a low-cost index fund.
    I think it is perfectly reasonable to read that as "every single person in that 67 % will get the same exact return as the index (minus fees), so they should just not bother." That is self-evidently not true, as you yourself pointed out. And even if the statement is only about groups, why is it that someone in that 67% who is consistently getting outsized returns would want to give that up for the smaller market returns (and in so doing lessen the average market return)?

    It does not follow that because most individuals won't beat a market that all will not -- or should even feel they need to measure their returns against that market.
  • mrdarcey said:

    rjb112 said:


    It does not follow that because most individuals won't beat a market that all will not -- or should even feel they need to measure their returns against that market.
    ++++++++++++++
    Certainly so mrdarcy.
    And Bogle knows this. His son is an active mutual fund manager who has soundly beaten the market using a quant strategy, and Bogle is invested in his son's mutual fund. That fund, BOGLX, has a 5-year return of 25.32%, versus the S & P 500 return of 18.86% for the same time period. That's a very impressive record, and the 10-year record is also admirable, and beats "the market" as well as the fund's M* category.

    And Vanguard has a large number of actively managed funds. Bogle is well aware that the former manager of the Vanguard Windsor Fund, John Neff, beat the pants off the market for 31 years, while Bogle was at Vanguard running the place.

    As far as the whole universe of actively managed funds, that's a different matter, and what Bogle speaks about.

    There were some comments above, but I'm not sure if anyone read the Noble Laureate Dr. William Sharpe's paper, stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

    It deserves reading, and commentary.

    Comments above suggested that the information is perhaps not applicable, as the index does not include stocks that active managers invest in. I'm not yet convinced. The Vanguard Total Market Index fund currently invests in 3684 stocks. If I am correct on this, that includes every stock in the S & P 500, every midcap stock, and all (or almost all) the stocks in the Russell 2000. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that. The only thing left out would be illiquid microcaps, yet the Total Market Index does include microcaps, but certainly not all of them.

    But I don't believe a huge number of fund managers are focusing on microcaps.
    The point was also made about stocks of companies coming out of bankruptcy, and initial public offerings.

    But lets talk about the vast majority, and not the very slim minority. Let's get to the center, and not dwell on the fringes. How many initial public offerings are there, and how significant is this to our discussion here? How many stocks of companies coming out of bankruptcy are contained in the portfolios of Mutual Fund Observer participants?

    Is the information contained in William Sharpe's paper correct, which is essentially the identical information that Bogle talks about above, and has been talking about for decades?

  • rjb112 said:


    Is the information contained in William Sharpe's paper correct, which is essentially the identical information that Bogle talks about above, and has been talking about for decades?

    Are you really saying the roughly 1400 stocks out of the total of 5000 US stocks not in VTSMX are all microcaps? Please clarify as to where you get this inference from.

    Sharpe has a model within which his mathematical result is correct. The point is that the model assumptions don't fit reality because of ALL the factors mentioned in the comment above. So, you cannot generalize the results of that model to something that doesn't fit the assumptions of the model.

    Think about why VISVX has beaten VTSMX over the long term even though VTSMX probably includes ALL the stocks in VISVX. If you have actually read Sharpe's paper, can you resolve the paradox mentioned above?:-)

    Active managers have a lot of tools at their disposal - going to cash in overvaluation periods, modifying the allocation to be different from the index, going outside the index, etc and Sharpe's model doesn't model that reality in its assumptions.

    Note that it doesn't mean that the active managers will necessarily beat the index from the above but that the mathematical results of Sharpe doesn't say apply to the reality when managers are able to violate the assumptions in reality.

    You seem to be making the case that managers don't violate the above assumptions to make a difference in practice. I am not sure that position is justified given the entire universe of funds and the number of stocks outside the index. It can only be resolved with concrete data.
  • Sure, its true but I think this is a simple throwaway statement. As an analogy, what if you and 5 friends make a pact using a coin that says when it is your birthday and if you hold the coin, someone else in the group will step forward and buy it from you for whatever price you name. Or maybe its a closed bid auction and everyone has to bid for the coin on your birthday. (OK, this may need some fleshing out) In any case, the coin changes hands, the group of 6 doesn't gain or lose any money overall but obviously someone could and would be a winner.

    What I find interesting is the same folk that tell you that the world earns the market return are quick to tell you the average investor falls far short of that return (by as much as 50% of that return). Well then some other group must be earning what the average guy leaves behind, no?

    As to Sharpe's paper, where is he drawing the box? His market is every intangible and tangible item on the globe. What if I sold stocks in 2008, and bought a restored 1970 Chevelle? Are my current gains weighed against those that bought my stocks and sold me that car? What if the guy who sold me the car bought machine tools and started business - how can Sharpe say its all in one box?
  • I seriously doubt that Sharpe or Bogle or anyone else ever argued that it was mathematically impossible to beat some index by going outside that index. Or underperform by more than the costs involved for that matter. Surely their argument is that as a practical matter there are investable indexes around (VTSMX) that capture so much of the potential investable market that large players, e.g. mutual funds in general, aren't going to be able to beat it by way of whatever IPOs or private placements or (I would presume micro) stocks out of the index that they manage to buy.

    Anyone know what the largest publicly traded stock outside of VTSMX is? I would be surprised if it's very large.
  • edited May 2014
    @vert, there are two separate points being mixed up here.

    One being inside the box for Sharpe's mathematical guarantee. Obviously, bigger the box, the more difficult it is to find stocks outside it. Sharp's assertion is about ANY box. VTSMX is just one example of it. But his results have been used to claim the result for ANY index vs active fund in that category, for example, that large cap active funds cannot beat SP 500 index for mathematical reasons as outlined by Sharpe. This is incorrect. So, the violations of those inside-the-box assumptions should not be ignored.

    The second point is that Sharpe's mathematical results are valid regardless of what the active managers do within that box. But this result is true only when the index to measure against is constructed in a way that is impossible to have a fund for in practice because of the required allocation. VTSMX (or any index fund in any box) is not it. If you use those then you get the paradox I have described above.

    To understamd why, one has to understand Sharpe's argument for the result not just the abstract and summary talking points. Let me illustrate by a simple example.

    Consider a box that contains only two stocks A and B equally priced to keep it simple. There are two active investors IA and IB each of whom own one share of A and B respectively. Let us say an index owns a share each of A and B. Sharpe's argument works like this:

    Say A goes up 10% and B goes up 20% with IA and IB realizing the corresponding results. The index gains 15% from owning both. Sharpes' thesis is that IB overperformed by 5% but IA underperformed by 5%, so the average investor dollar didn't beat the index and will be worse after fees. This is the correct part.

    But there is an implied assumption about that index that is critical. What if there was a third investor who also owned B? The average over all investors is then 16.67%, a 1.67% win over the index for the average. Or what if all the three owned only B? All of them beat that index by 5%! That is the paradox.

    If you think about what happened here, Sharpe's formulation is correct ONLY when the index you consider contains the underlying stocks in the SAME proportion as the aggregate stock holdings from all active investors. There will be no paradox here.

    The index cannot be market cap weighted, or equal weighted or ANY weighting unrelated to the actual share proportions held by investors. Not only is any index fund like VTSMX far away from this, it is not even possible in practice to create such a fund because it will have to continuously keep altering its allocation to match what investors are doing!

    Again, this is all about the validity of the mathematical guarantee. Good theory but not very applicable in practice and incorrectly propagated by people who only understand the headlines.
  • >> manager who has soundly beaten the market using a quant strategy,

    Uh. BOGLX looks like a small-cap, so no wonder it has beaten SP500. It is a v good performer more recently, yes, since you can exclude its huge drop 08-09.

    I mean, compare with GABSX and FLPSX for periods longer than 5y, like 7-8-9-10. Note the depth of that dip.
  • edited May 2014
    "Are you really saying the roughly 1400 stocks out of the total of 5000 US stocks not in VTSMX are all microcaps? Please clarify as to where you get this inference from."
    ++++++
    I'm not sure on that.....but my guess is that the vast majority are. I'll find this out. I just sent off an email to the company that developed the index for Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index fund. The Vanguard reps did not have the answer, and I have no way to contact the people who run the Vanguard index funds.

    By the way, I believe your argument is even stronger than you are making it out to be! Nevertheless, I'll provide you with more ammunition!
    By my estimate, there are 6,281 stocks on the NASDAQ plus NYSE, so you are being too nice.....your argument is stronger than you stated it to be! So my guess is that there are 2,597 stocks unaccounted for in the total market index, not just 1400 ! Of course, there are also lots of stocks in the over the counter market which I'm sure the indexers won't mess with due to liquidity and size constraints, and other factors. But not that many active mutual funds will mess with them either.

    You have a lot of excellent points, and I'm determined to study this issue to understand it better. I'm quite certain I don't understand this issue anywhere near what I would like.
    I'm already in full agreement with most of your points.
    +++

    "Otherwise, if the active managers, in theory, market time perfectly, and go to cash before a crash with the loss in value from such sales captured by everybody including the index funds, then the active managers can ALL beat the indices by staying out of the marker for the crash"
    +++

    What's up with that? How can ALL active investors sell? Who are they going to sell to?
    The passive investors, or indexers, are just buying and holding the index. To keep with the theme of the discussion, I don't see how it is possible for ALL the active investors to sell and go to cash. They can't sell unless there are other active investors to buy their stocks.

    Also, apparently there must be some (not on MFO) who think that 'no one can beat the indexes.' Of course they can. Just look at performance figures. As I mentioned above, John Neff beat the pants off the index for 31 years!! Charles Akre has consistently beat the indexes for well more than a decade at two fund shops. What about Peter Lynch......It's quite clear that tons of mutual funds and tons of active managers have beaten the indexes in their investing universes or 'categories.' I think the question that Sharpe and Bogle address is whether the average performance of all active investors in aggregate beat their respective indexes, or the universe that they invest in, after expenses.

    I think cman hit on the critical point, that for this stuff to be mathematically true, you have to be talking about exactly the same investing universe of stocks. So "the index" or "the indices" have to be very clearly defined. And if the active managers invest in stocks that are not in the indexes, then the math assumptions, including what William Sharpe wrote and what Bogle talks about, do not hold.





  • rjb112 said:

    Nevertheless, I'll provide you with more ammunition!
    By my estimate, there are 6,281 stocks on the NASDAQ plus NYSE, so you are being too nice.....your argument is stronger than you stated it to be! So my guess is that there are 2,597 stocks unaccounted for in the total market index, not just 1400 !

    Thx, the number keeps changing depending on when it was counted in the economic cycle. It has been as high as 9000+ in the recent past. 5000 was used as a lower bound.

    What's up with that? How can ALL active investors sell? Who are they going to sell to?
    The passive investors, or indexers, are just buying and holding the index. To keep with the theme of the discussion, I don't see how it is possible for ALL the active investors to sell and go to cash. They can't sell unless there are other active investors to buy their stocks.
    Sell to all the index funds and ETFs that must keep buying mindlessly with net inflow of money into each fund, of course.:-)

    Index fund and buy and hold are independent concepts. Index funds may not churn stocks (and so passive that way) but they are buying and selling all the time based on net flows of money in and out of the fund. Active traders use index etfs to trade.

    Selling everything is a logical extreme in theory. The point is that the more the active funds sell losing stocks to go to cash, the greater the divergence from the index performance mathematically and Sharpe's guarantee.

    In practice, active investors can be thankful for the liquidity provided by index funds for stocks in the index when there is net inflow of money into index funds. Helps their rotation or profit taking strategy.

    For example, transports are currently extremely relatively overbought and funds trading technically will be dumping them over the next few weeks/months if other sectors don't catch up. A lot of it will be purchased by index funds unless there is a net outflow of money from index funds in which case they will sell as well and we get a big correction.
    I think cman hit on the critical point, that for this stuff to be mathematically true, you have to be talking about exactly the same investing universe of stocks. So "the index" or "the indices" have to be very clearly defined. And if the active managers invest in stocks that are not in the indexes, then the math assumptions, including what William Sharpe wrote and what Bogle talks about, do not hold.
    It is worse as pointed above. It is not ANY index fund that can be used for the mathematical guarantee. Only the theoretical index that is a close enough representation of the proportional holdings across all investors at all times of all stocks held by them. You cannot run a real fund in practice with that property.

    As to how closely the typical market cap weighted index funds tracks that theoretical index in practice, I don't have concrete data. But I would expect it to vary significantly and diverge more as the market cap range increases in the category being indexed.
  • cman said:

    rjb112 said:

    Nevertheless, I'll provide you with more ammunition!
    By my estimate, there are 6,281 stocks on the NASDAQ plus NYSE, so you are being too nice.....your argument is stronger than you stated it to be! So my guess is that there are 2,597 stocks unaccounted for in the total market index, not just 1400 !

    Thx, the number keeps changing depending on when it was counted in the economic cycle. It has been as high as 9000+ in the recent past. 5000 was used as a lower bound.

    What's up with that? How can ALL active investors sell? Who are they going to sell to?
    The passive investors, or indexers, are just buying and holding the index. To keep with the theme of the discussion, I don't see how it is possible for ALL the active investors to sell and go to cash. They can't sell unless there are other active investors to buy their stocks.
    Sell to all the index funds and ETFs that must keep buying mindlessly with net inflow of money into each fund, of course.:-)

    Index fund and buy and hold are independent concepts. Index funds may not churn stocks (and so passive that way) but they are buying and selling all the time based on net flows of money in and out of the fund. Active traders use index etfs to trade.

    Selling everything is a logical extreme in theory. The point is that the more the active funds sell losing stocks to go to cash, the greater the divergence from the index performance mathematically and Sharpe's guarantee.

    In practice, active investors can be thankful for the liquidity provided by index funds for stocks in the index when there is net inflow of money into index funds. Helps their rotation or profit taking strategy.

    For example, transports are currently extremely relatively overbought and funds trading technically will be dumping them over the next few weeks/months if other sectors don't catch up. A lot of it will be purchased by index funds unless there is a net outflow of money from index funds in which case they will sell as well and we get a big correction.
    I think cman hit on the critical point, that for this stuff to be mathematically true, you have to be talking about exactly the same investing universe of stocks. So "the index" or "the indices" have to be very clearly defined. And if the active managers invest in stocks that are not in the indexes, then the math assumptions, including what William Sharpe wrote and what Bogle talks about, do not hold.
    It is worse as pointed above. It is not ANY index fund that can be used for the mathematical guarantee. Only the theoretical index that is a close enough representation of the proportional holdings across all investors at all times of all stocks held by them. You cannot run a real fund in practice with that property.

    As to how closely the typical market cap weighted index funds tracks that theoretical index in practice, I don't have concrete data. But I would expect it to vary significantly and diverge more as the market cap range increases in the category being indexed.
    Wouldn't they say that cash is outside the investable universe they're talking about? I'd imagine they'd argue that it's impossible to judge which stocks are going to go down so successful use of cash is a random fluctuation. And of course, they've shown they're not above tossing in phantom 'risk' factors to explain any discrepancies.

    All in all, thinking about this is a ridiculous waste of a lovely Sunday morning.
  • Vert said:


    Wouldn't they say that cash is outside the investable universe they're talking about? I'd imagine they'd argue that it's impossible to judge which stocks are going to go down so successful use of cash is a random fluctuation. And of course, they've shown they're not above tossing in phantom 'risk' factors to explain any discrepancies.

    No. Not in the context of Sharpe's mathematical result being specifically discussed here.

    In the general world of indexology, yes that would be an argument. But that is a tangential argument unrelated to the specific paper being discussed here and indeed a waste of a fine Sunday to get into.
Sign In or Register to comment.