Whose Investment Prediction Should You Believe?

"The ability to see that some things cannot be foreseen is a very necessary quality." -- Jean Jacque Rousseau.

It's the season when so many analysts participate in a group masochistic ritual: the annual yearly predictions. Like lemmings, they rush to the edge and leap. That they are so often wrong does not seem to deter them from making the same mistake the next year. And there they differ from lemmings, in that they live to repeat the act every year.

As we will see, they often recycle the same mistakes from the previous year, in the hope that this year it will be right. It also helps that they do not lose their jobs if they are wrong. I will also be participating in this tribal rite, although I will take a week off in Mexico, contemplating the tides of both the ocean and the economy, prior to charging once more into the forecasting…