Never Forget That Every Financial Forecast Is 100 Percent Worthless

Hey, how are the markets looking? How about them markets? Where do you think the markets will be going in the coming year? Let’s turn to the highly paid professionals, shall we?

Here we have a of the 2017 stock market forecasts from the highly paid strategists at America’s top banks. What lies ahead? Where will the market stand this time next year? All of these highly paid strategists have ideas. And the common theme of all of their forecasts are: they are completely and totally worthless.

History suggests investors should ignore these year-ahead guesses. The average strategist hasn’t started a year predicting a stock-market drop in any of the surveys carried out by Bloomberg since 2000, while shares fell one year in three.

Forget forecasting where the market will be—one third of the time, they can’t even get the direction right.

Strong gains were forecast in 2008, when the market had its worst year in generations. Strategists then became cautious, making their lowest forecast in 2009 since the survey began, only for the market to rebound 23%.

Just ask your kindergartener to fingerpaint a sequence of numbers on a piece of construction paper. This forecast will be equally useful.

At J.P. Morgan, Mr. Loeys says what many strategists will only admit in private: forecasts for the level of the market have “no value.”

“We do forecasts because our client base asks for forecasts, not because we have any great advantage in forecasting levels,” he said.

We feed you bullshit because you love it!!

If anyone can get me a job as a Wall Street strategist please let me know.