{"id":22578,"date":"2017-01-29T15:04:10","date_gmt":"2017-01-29T20:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22578"},"modified":"2017-01-29T15:04:10","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T20:04:10","slug":"the-futility-of-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22578","title":{"rendered":"The Futility of Predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Futility of Predictions<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
Awesome Forecasts and the Unknowable Future<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Back in late 2013 I wrote a\u00a0piece on human nature<\/a>\u00a0which was in part\u00a0inspired by the bullish exuberance exhibited by a\u00a0MarketWatch article<\/a>\u00a0predicting the DJIA at 20,000 in the near term future. Yesterday afternoon, a bit over three years later, that prediction actually became reality and I\u2019m sure the author of that\u00a0article as well as many other like minded\u00a0traders popped some champagne in celebration of their awesome ability to predict the future.<\/p>\n

A trader from the (near) future. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Image via tumblr.com<\/p>\n

Now don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m happy for those guys and for the Dow Jones. Assuming of course that everyone involved actually put their money where their mouth was back then \u2013 which ever few do. And that in essence was the underlying message of my post.<\/p>\n

In yesterday\u2019s update\u00a0I briefly touched on hindsight bias and how we all have a knack for bending the past in our respective favor. Nobody wants to look stupid after all. And in hindsight, all of us would have liked to have bought the S&P 500\u00a0at 667 in 2008 and then traded it all the way up to just below 2300 today.<\/p>\n

Except of course that we didn\u2019t (please raise your hand if you did). And that is quite a humbling lesson to learn in our ongoing quest to obtain riches from\u00a0market participants\u00a0who happen to disagree with us. It\u2019s not that we didn\u2019t foresee this event, actually many people probably did.<\/p>\n

It is about how difficult it is to actually\u00a0translate such information or ideas into profits. Back in 2008, as well as in 2013, there was no way of\u00a0truly knowing where the DJIA\u00a0or the S&P 500 would be trading all those years later. So what makes anyone think they know what the future holds \u2013 today?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Futility of Predictions Awesome Forecasts and the Unknowable Future Back in late 2013 I wrote a\u00a0piece on human nature\u00a0which was in part\u00a0inspired by the bullish exuberance exhibited by a\u00a0MarketWatch article\u00a0predicting the DJIA at 20,000 in the near term future. Yesterday afternoon, a bit over three years later, that prediction actually became reality and I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5728,341,2725],"class_list":["post-22578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-acting-man","tag-future","tag-predictions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22579,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22578\/revisions\/22579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}