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Predicting failure is easy. Predicting success is hard. Your quote is only about the easy part.


They also get 55% on success for A-rated companies, which is also pretty good. It's not quite 60%, but it's very close, and considering how much above 60% they get on predicting failures, I think that shows a fairly high accuracy of prediction.


55% is just as close to 50% (coin toss) as 60%.


Far far less than half of companies succeed. So identifying successful companies by random draw is not equivalent to a coin toss. In the case of this study, its 10%.


55% on A-rated companies is way better than the "coin-toss" model of randomly assigning a rating to each company, because there are more than two ratings.


I apologise for ever posting this trainwreck of statistical reasoning. I don't know what I was thinking.




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