Bogus Research of the Day?

"A linear link between S&P 500 return and the change rate of the number of nine-year-olds in the USA has been found."

Ivan Kitov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Oleg Kitov (brothers?) of the University of Warwick

Why nine-year-olds? That requires digging a little deeper into the world of Ivan Kitov. He says he has determined that GDP growth

"in developed countries is found to be a sum of two terms. The first term is the reciprocal value of the duration of the period of mean income growth with work experience, Tcr. The current value of Tcr in the USA is 40 years. The second term is inherently related to population and defined by the relative change in the number of people with a specific age."

He arrived at the magic number nine through calibrating his model. (i.e., it's arbitrary)

As for predicting the S&P 500, here's a graph from the Kitov showing the returns of the index through 2010:

Not exactly exact, but not way off either. (He got the November decline right.) You can read more of Kitov's musings on each of his three blogs:

Inflation in the USA
Economic inequality in the USA
Real economic growth in the USA