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How to make sense of market forecasts in wartime

Jared Dilian
Jared Dilian • 4 min read
How to make sense of market forecasts in wartime
Anyone who correctly guesses the future level of a stock index, interest rates or the price of oil is probably lucky.
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In late 2019, when I had a nationally syndicated radio show, I was asked by my partners to come up with some predictions for the coming year in stocks, bonds, politics, geopolitics and some other topics.

I protested, saying it was impossible to look out an entire year with any sort of clarity and that we were setting ourselves up for embarrassment. I lost the argument, and I came up with a list of 12 predictions. Most of them ended up being horrendously wrong.

I said gold would outperform stocks by 40% — and it did! But only for a moment during the early days of the pandemic. I also forecast that oil prices would probably go up a lot (they actually went negative for the first time in history, falling to as low as minus US$40 a barrel), and that either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders would win the presidential election. I did correctly predict that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates, but I was right for the wrong reasons.

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