Upon further analysis i have come to feel it is important for me to give this rather "rudimentary" lesson in business finance because down the line someone might tell you that your earlier analysis is faulty because it did not take into consideration such things as GDP and Assets.

Now let me make it clear from the start.  There is no correlation between GDP, Assets, and Value.

Business Accounting 101 tells you that "book value" is equal to Assets - Liabilities.  Looking at assets without looking at liabilities makes no sense--otherwise you would end up going bankrupt like Trump usually does.

Value is the measure and the only real meaningful measure for value is value, itself--whether that be book value or market value (with my own preference being market value).

Asset data without Liability data is limiting from an analytical standpoint.  However, asset data by itself may still carry some analytical value.  For example, I developed a variable called Value/Assets and then i sorted on that result.  

When you are investigating new variables for consideration in your analysis sometimes it is good to look at the two different ends of the data variable.

I did this and my finding really "tickled me".  At the bottom of the list of Value/Assets were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that is exactly where they belong.  So you see, sometimes even if the new data variable is not a 'primary' variable, it can still serve its purposes as a 'secondary level' variable.

The Assets by country is totally different from that which we saw with Value by country.   That may provide you some secondary level information, but it is not important from a primary level perspective.

Here is an anecdote, even though i hate anecdotes.  My father was a banker, who kept his knowledge of affairs pretty close to his chest.  But i can remember mentioning once to my father that i thought a certain family must be quite wealthy because of everything they owned.  He simply said.  Sometimes what you see is not really the truth.  Assets by itself, in other words.

Well, god damn it, we have finally gotten to election day.  If this is not decided real early i am going to be really, really pissed.  I am already pissed we did not pursue the Wall Street Journal endorsement.  I wanted every f------- vote we could get.  Even so, i remain semi-confident (90%) that we will win, knowing full well that i am not working with the same data that the two parties are.

I have been putting quite a bit of my retirement effort into this election.  I don't want to be greedy, but after all is said and done, i would like to be rewarded at least in some way for that effort.