Shifting the end point was an example from the stock market (I think I remember better now: to make your fund look good, you can almost always find a point in the past from where you made earnings relative to today). It was just an example of hand picking data to prove what you want.<p>I have nothing against this particular data set. I just doubt that it is all that relevant in the bigger picture. It is just another data point that can be fed into models and whatnot.