Practicing fortune-telling...

There are events that can be very difficult to predict, like “acts of god,” natural catastrophes as wells as many accidents and forms of death. While everything can always be somehow explained in hindsight, the domains that are easier to foretell are those linked with human behavior, man-made schemes and economic evolution. Today, we’ll focus on what it takes to make smart and accurate predictions. First, like the street-corner fortune teller, it helps a lot to have a great amount of practice. This is something I’ve been trying to do on a daily basis when I focus on the stock market and attempt to guess where it will go for the day. Sometime, I get Evelyne involved in the exercise, and most often than not, both of us can guess its movements with a fair amount of accuracy. What I’ve also learned so far is that, barring a catastrophic and unforeseen event, predicting is a subtle mix between listening to one’s gut feelings and integrating it with a related knowledge-base, but it needs to be done both in an intuitive yet detached manner. That mean you need to learn a lot through reading, listening around, observing as well as probing deep into yourself. That also means that you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the television’s “talking heads” or other gurus because these folks are there to put up a show and seldom will speak from their heart and will certainly try to peddle their own bias. You should also remember that no one will every say truths that could profoundly disturb the populace and create a run on the banks, so the final analysis will always be up to you and no one else. With all this, you may want to conclude that seeing forward is more an art than a technique, but we all knew it already…