It is no secret that various people or bodies within the financial services industry will say or write whatever will sell the products, rather than what is actually true and correct. For this reason, buyers may be more inclined to rely on what they think is hard evidence – in the form of statistics and charts. Regrettably, one can lie with these too.
In 1954, Darell Huff wrote a classic book titled "How To Lie With Statistics," and a German professor by the name of Walter Krämer has had enormous success with a similar book with the same title, except in German "So Lügt Man Mit Statistik" (revised edition, Piper Verlag, 2011). The charts below are also from the book.
In this article, we will see that it is possible to present financial...