The Treasurer's Update
The Numbers Game
The strange thing about numbers is that, no matter what mathematicians tell us, they do not always behave as they should. They are not always, well, rational. For example, the returns for the Sigma Tau Delta portfolio this past year promised to be modest ones—2012, after all, was a volatile year. Elections, unemployment, recession, fiscal cliffs—all of them numbers games, and most of them scary.
And yet, with all that upheaval, our investments were supposed to see gains of perhaps as much as five percent.
But numbers misbehave. And ours did.
Instead of those modest gains, our accounts saw increases of 12.4 percent, or nearly $170,000. And while the numbers are unexpected, this is the sort of math even an English major can get behind.