Quotes About Forecasting

I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers but I don't want to bad mouth astrologers.

The value of a company can be derived from adding the value of all future dividends written down to net present value. Therefore, a reasoned view of the future is essential.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

Pundits are no better at forecasting election outcomes than they would be at predicting the final path of a hurricane. Smart pundits should consider either abandoning this activity or consulting with the geeks before rendering their guesses.

I'm practical, very data-driven, and process-oriented. If I look at a radar and see a giant green blob coming toward me, I'm thinking it's probably going to snow.

The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, "Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future

Lo que importa no es la inflación per se, sino la inflación no anticipada

Despite an appearance of infallibility, computer projections are not prescient. —TICIA CENVA, former leader of the Sorceresses of Rossak

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." – Winston Churchill

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.

The amount of time we can successfully predict the state of a chaotic system depends on three things: how much error we're willing to tolerate in the forecast; how precisely we can measure the initial state of the system; and a time scale that's beyond our control, called the Lyapunov time, which depends on the inherent dynamics of the system itself.

There are nine million servers sold annually. Of those, just one million are sourced by the big guys. What we're trying to predict is: in the future, is that all going into the one million category? Or will there be some balance?

The vision that we laid out in 2004 was designed, at best, for a 10-year period. And it was pretty clear that the vision that we laid out in 2004 by the time we arrived in 2010-11 was not working anymore.

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.

The stock market is almost magical because it always leads the economy. It goes down long before the economy drops and then heads higher long before the economy rebounds. It always has.

Different, not opposite. That's the key to using professional forecasts—and the key to being a contrarian.

Predicting the stock market is really predicting how other investors will change estimates they are now making with all their best efforts. This means that, for a market forecaster to be right, the consensus of all others must be wrong and the forecaster must determine in which direction-up or down-the market will be moved by changes in the consensus of those same active investors.

Forecasts are difficult to make—particularly those about the future.

No truth can be determined that concerns the future.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark tonight turning to partly light in the morning.

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.