Today’s lesson in innumeracy is provided by Michael Jones, CIO of Riverfront Investment Group. Mr. Jones was a guest on CNBC on April 20, 2015. At 1:23 of his video interview, Mr. Jones informs us that: “. . . earnings in Europe will be up close to 20% in the first quarter, you are seeing the stock market up almost as much, which means . . . [European stocks] are still very cheap relative to the U.S.”

Thanks, Mr. Jones — I don’t know how I missed a 20% rally in European stocks; evidently I need to pay better attention to markets. Let’s take a look at a chart of the S&P 500 and MSCI European Index:

I don’t know, Mr. Jones — S&P’s Capital IQ thinks that European stocks only rose 3.36% from January 1 to April 1. Is 3.36% “almost 20%” over at Riverfront? Must be that new math everyone’s talking about ($17 trillion of global quantitative easing increases the demand for innumerate money managers). Just wondering if over at Riverfront they round all clients’ portfolio returns up an additional 16.64% when they are computing performance fees . . .