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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Sure - for the 2009-2015 time period.

But the claim was not "everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1". The actual claim was "when things go wrong everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1". Look at the data from 2008, not 2009-2015.

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https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-correlations?s=y&n...

Correlation = -0.49 for 2008.

I see. So in 2008, what seems to have happened is a flight to safety, and therefore bonds and the stock market were very much not correlated.

I stand corrected.

You can't use a treasury ETF as a proxy for the whole bond market.

If you look hard enough, you will find specific periods with any values of the correlation. Portfolio is about long-term strategy. That is not to say that I disagree that asset classes became more correlated lately.

Do you have a link for 2008?

He said "... bad advice as they are now positively correlated."

No. I heard it as a common, repeated observation about 2008, but I don't have a link to actual data.

Yet in your previous comment you were urging people to look at the data... perhaps you should follow your own advice?

Well, my point was that tosseraccount's evidence that the claim was wrong did not in fact apply. I was not actually asserting that the claim was true (though I believe it is), merely that the evidence cited against it was irrelevant because it was the wrong time period.

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