Your task is to evaluate Siegel’s concept of the black turkey event by asking whether or not these events do occur in the data as claimed by Kaplan in his paper. So you will have to make a judgment of the data supports the presence of black turkey events, or it does not. Most importantly, you will need to argue whether or not black turkey events are consistent, or inconsistent with the weak efficient markets hypothesis.

Here are some criteria to apply to your evaluation:

1. Is Kaplan’s use of the data convincing? Do you see these events as occurring with some frequency? What does it mean to say “willfully blind” Which market actors ARE willfully blind? Traders, investors, portfolio advisers, or academics (among other possibilities).

2. Kaplan discusses distributional assumptions regarding the random series of returns. Why is this important (linking back to criterion 1)? Do you think he is making the right, or a convincing, inference from the data in his remarks on returns distributions?

3. Would you classify Kaplan’s list of crashes as anomalies, or something more important? That is, as evidence for, or against weak efficient markets? So, the criterion for evaluating the claim is whether or not Kaplan is providing evidence for, or against, weakly efficient markets.