The New York Times DealBook has a pithy, if not entirely fair piece on Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) CEO James Cayne's golfing habits, and their correlation with Bear's subprime troubles. Apparently the writers over there have too much time on their hands because they look up Cayne's golf scores for the past couple months and then plotted them on a graph to find a 35% correlation between his golf game and the company's stock: "That's a fairly weak, but "positive" correlation - which means that as Bear's stock has gone down, his golf game has generally gotten better."
While this is inane and I don't think anyone would argue it has any real value, I would say its significance lies in its inanity. As DealBook writes, "With traders searching for clues to the subprime crisis nearly everywhere, the golf course seems as good a place as any."
As we hears tons of explanations for the market's gyrations, keep that in mind: "Is X any more reasonable of an explanation than James Cayne's golf scores?" Many of the statistics trumpeted by pundits on CNBC probably aren't.
And studying Cayne's golf scores is a lot more interesting.
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