Hey Ben it's Tottis how's it going? Hey Taddis. Hey we were we both wrote about a piece talking about the kind of the equity risk premium over kind of versus real estate over a couple of centuries and it kind of got me thinking about a topic which I know I've written about and you've written about as well and that's really kind of thinking about

data equity market data over not just decades but centuries and so I guess one of my

first questions to you is you know what how should we really think about that data I mean we've

really only had computers and computerized data for you know really not that long

but you know people purport to have data for stocks going back you know all the way

back to the 1800s so yeah and unfortunately I think a lot of people take it as they

take it at face value to that those numbers must be exact because I mean you think about it like the

Schiller data that he uses for the Cape ratio goes back to 1871 but I read about it and I think in one of his books or maybe the New York Times or something.

He actually came up with the Cape ratio in 1988 when he wrote an article about it.

So obviously they had to piece a lot of that data together and even Schiller said going into the real estate crisis,

one of the reasons that it was so hard for people to understand what was happening with real estate prices

is because no one had ever bothered to put that data together and he was one of the first ones to do it.

So not only is the data old, but the collection of the data is relatively new and obviously they're using data collected at the time,

but I wish I had a time frame to give

in terms of here's a drop dead

and when you can use it or can't use,

but I think you just have to take it

with a huge grain of salt.

No, I think that's absolutely right.

I mean, I think, you know, it's amazing because I think you're,

I think you hit it on the head.

People take that data as kind of as gospel.

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