I am not sure if I am the only one but recently I came to the conclusion that reading any type of market news, expert analyses and opinions is completely useless and does not and can not inform decisions in any meaningful way.
Here is a distilled outline of pretty much every expert analysis I have read in the past month:
- 40% analysis of past events – brought to us by the power of hindsight
- 40% analysis of the current situation – by current I mean very recent past, also brought to us by the power of hindsight
- 20% the “prediction” part – this is supposed to be the point – for them to give us useful and actionable information on the future developments
Now the problem with the prediction part and why I put it in quotes is that when you parse all the jargon and verbiage – this is more difficult with the “better” experts – they can talk a lot and talk well. But what you get once you distill it all is this:
if [condition] then [something happens]
where the condition is something you cannot predict. So in principle, their “prediction” comes down to “if prices go up then they go up”. One example for all:
“… <verbiage> in case Russia invades Ukraine, <jargon> we can expect a more risk averse approach and therefore further drop in prices, <more verbiage and jargon>”
However, since there is no way to predict whether the invasion will happen, this prediction is totally empty of any useful information. It is equivalent to saying “in case prices drop they drop”, because of course once the information is out that the invasion happened, the market will react much faster than we can act on it.
Do you also have similar experience with reading expert analyses/predictions/opinions? Do you even feel like it makes sense to listen to them? How do you use them?