Data-snooping--finding seemingly significant but in fact spurious patterns in the data--is a serious problem in financial analysis. Although it afflicts all non-experimental sciences, data-snooping is particularly problematic for financial analysis because of the large number of empirical studies performed on the same datasets. Given enough time, enough attempts, and enough imagination, almost any pattern can be teased out of any dataset. In some cases, these spurious patterns are statistically small, almost unnoticeable in isolation. But because small effects in financial calculations can often lead to very large differences in investment performance, data-snooping biases can be surprisingly substantial. In this review article, I provide several examples of data-snooping biases, explain why it is impossible to eliminate them completely, and propose several ways to guard against the most extreme forms of data-snooping in financial analysis.

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