Alpha/beta: Is it the dog or the tail ?

摘要

By measuring alpha and beta using a relatively simple spreadsheet program we can utilize this typically long-term analysis to anticipate shorter-term price breakouts and create strategies to profit from them. Alpha and beta are two important measures of a security's performance. They relate to the variability of other assets in the portfolio or the index of which the security is a part. For example, XOM is part of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Index and it also is a component of a number of other indexes, including the S&P 500.