Robeco’s Lukas Daalder has a bit of an issue with rolling-performance graphics. Bashing a recent chart of 1-year price returns on these pages that profiled ETF proxies for the major asset classes, he charges that “this information is useless to anyone with any sense.” Oh, dear. That sounds like trouble. Has your editor led you down a dead end? Apparently. “So if the people who compiled the graph were hoping to draw our attention to any one particular issue, they have failed,” Daalder asserts. But failure sometimes has a way of turning into success, or at least it did in this case. After advising that there was no value in a chart of rolling 1-year returns of funds representing the major asset classes, he adds that this information “still tells us something.”
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● Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
By Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Review via Inverse
Phil Tetlock believes we can predict the future — we, us, anyone. In his new book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, the Wharton management professor and psychologist makes the case that futurists are skilled, not special. Normal people can make boggling accurate predictions if they just know how to go about it right and how to practice.
Tetlock backs up his crystal ball populism with data: He’s spent the better part of the last decade testing the forecasting abilities of 20,000 ordinary Americans in The Good Judgment Project on topics ranging from melting glaciers to the stability of the Eurozone, only to find that the amateur predictions were more accurate — if not more so — than those of the pundits and so-called forecasting ‘experts’ the media so often defers to.
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