Taken together, some 2,000 stocks

Answer choices

1. A

   Weakens6% picked this

   Taken together, the stocks recommended on the television show performed better than the market as a whole

   This allows to argue that "maybe some people should sometimes follow some of their advice" by telling us that recently, their picks seem to be outperforming the market. Maybe these investor were so wise and prescient that they recommended getting in on the ground floor of very small fledgling companies. Over the first 10 years of Amazon being in business, those stockholders probably saw no return on their investment (Amazon was still growing from operating out of someone's garage, to having a storage space, to having a warehouse and a few employees, etc.) At a certain point, once the company started raking it in, the wisdom of investing early would start to pay off (and by now it would have made those early investors crazy rich). So this answer is suggesting that long-term seeds the investors were planting are starting to come to fruition and bringing better-than-average returns. In a nutshell, it suggests that 12 years may be too narrow a slice of time by which to gauge the investments.

   6%
2. B

   Weakens7% picked this

   Taken together, the stocks recommended on the television show performed better for the past 12-year period than stock portfolios that were actually

   This allows to argue that "maybe some people should sometimes follow some of these experts' advice" by telling us that this stock advice is better than any other stock advice someone could receive. It hurts the author's idea that "clearly these so-called experts don't know what they're doing". Maybe something really confusing (like a pandemic) happened that made the stock market behave in an impossible to predict fashion. If the guests on this show managed to outperform any other means of picking stocks, then it doesn't sound like they have a lack of expertise.

   7%
3. C

   Weakens15% picked this

   Performance of the stocks recommended on the television show was measured by stock dividends, whereas the performance of the market as a whole was

   This hurts the argument by making the evidence feel like a very unfair comparison. It would be like ranking one nail salon over another one by comparing how many customers were served at one location to how many bottles of nail polish were sold at the other. The two metrics are too different to be directly compared. We'd have to ask follow-up questions to understand which one is really performing better, so it makes the author's one piece of evidence seem to have very unclear impact.

   15%
4. D

   Correct62% picked this

   Performance of the stocks recommended on the television show was measured independently by a number of analysts, and the results

   Why this is right

   This makes us feel better about the author's evidence. This answer makes the author's evidence seem more trustworthy. A number of independent experts were involved in tabulating the stock performances, and they concurred in their measurements. This answer actually strengthens the argument somewhat (the correct answer didn't need to strengthen; it only needed to not-weaken).

   Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   62%
5. E

   Weakens11% picked this

   The stock portfolios for which the guests were consultants performed better for the past 12- year period than

   This is suggesting that the guests on the show, who are consultants for multibillion-dollar portfolios, are indeed experts who are capable of outperforming the market. After all, the stock portfolios they work on for a living outperformed the market. Thus, the clients of these consultants are probably people who "should follow recommendations by these experts". How come the stocks on the show underperformed the market as a whole, whereas the stocks the guests managed for their consultant clients overperformed? We don't know for sure, but it could be that these experts aren't willing to give away their coveted wisdom for free on a popular TV show. They'll give the stock picks they feel less confidently in to the free audience and save the juicy secret lotto-ticket recommendations for the rich clients that pay them to manage their wealth. But this answer provides a data point that offsets the persuasiveness of the author's evidence. The author was like, "these experts suck --- look at the stocks they recommended on TV, which underperformed the market!" This answer responds, "hmmm, do they suck? --- look at the stocks they recommended to their clients. Those overperformed."

   11%