I have found the Benford’s First-digit law interesting. The law states that in a list of data, the leading digit is distributed in a non-asymmetric way. Basically, he found that there are more “1s” than the other numbers (2 to 9) for the leading digit. This discovery applies to stock prices as well. I have tabulated some of the figures for the STI components. I did one data set for end-2007 which is the peak of the stock market and another for end-2008, which was near the bottom of the crash.

End 2007 – Before the crash

End 2008 – After the crash

Current 2011 figures

I deliberately chose 3 different periods of time – market peaking, market bottoming and market neutral. It is obviously true that the figures for the digit “1″ is the most frequent number despite different market condition. So what if this is the case? Is ...

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