by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
When I first began writing The Market Ticker I made a practice of doing a “Year in Review” ticker toward the back half of December with a list of predictions for the next year. Part of this, after the first one of course, was scoring myself on the previous year’s predictions.
Predictions for events, market-based, societal or political, with a year timeline are pretty tough. Most years I managed to get somewhere around a third to a half of them, and a couple of times a few more than that. Plenty of people thought this was a terrible record. Frankly, I’ll put that up against Gundlach, Gartman (who for a very long time was the absolute best person to bet against, ever) and a whole host of others, most of whom would be lucky to hit 10%. And while half sounds like random chance it’s not by any stretch of the imagination; these are not bets against professional odds-makers such as a football game where the book does its level best to set the line right at the 50/50 point and if they suck at it they are out of business in a very short period of time.