Quotes About Forecasting

The heart of Graham's argument is that the intelligent investor must never forecast the future exclusively by extrapolating the past.

But make sure you remember this: The people who now claim that the next "sure thing" will be health care, or energy, or real estate, or gold, are no more likely to be right in the end than the hypesters of high tech turned out to be.

Staying humble about your forecasting powers

There's been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can't predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Economists often get the market wrong.

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

It is important for investors to understand what they do and don't know. Learn to recognize that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future, and any investment plan that is dependent on accurately forecasting where markets will be next year is doomed to failure.

When there is a situation where one does not see demand for a year or two, then capex is suspended. It will reverse only when the situation improves.

What a company's been earning doesn't mean anything. What you have to look at is what people think it's going to earn. If you can see something in two years is going to be entirely different than the conventional wisdom, that's how you make money.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made

On the Psychology of Prediction

improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the one-day-out forecast had been in 2005. In just the last few years, for the first time in history, a meteorologist's forecast of how hot it will be nine days from now is better than just guessing.

A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'

To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

I pick up on styles, way before they get popular, pretty much before young kids do. I see 'em coming.

The Treasury has enough trouble with forecasts even when they are trying to get them right.

I'm always the last person in the world who would ever try to predict a trend.

We need to be in front of consumer trends and translate those trends into insights and foresights.

Forecasting Armageddon has become trendy of late, with a great deal of attention being given to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar suggesting that Mother Earth is destined for doom in December of 2012.