I’m in the middle of reading When Markets Collide by Mohamed A. El-Erian, and, although it’s a rather ho-hum book, I did find this interesting sentence:

PIMCO “looked closely at the way the housing market actually functioned at the microlevel. Their research included participating in “ride alongs” with local real estate and mortgage agents. Their findings … spoke clearly to the excesses taking place.

In and of itself perhaps not too astounding, but it’s implications are a bit astonishing.

1. During the housing bubble many investors were not doing the leg work to understand the very thing they were investing in.

2. And, (and perhaps more important from my perspective) how important doing the basic, almost ethnographic, research was to informing how PIMCO invested.

~alex