Quotes on Forecasting

Investor anticipations, similar to the laws of economics, are shaped at the margin. That is why changes in earnings estimates follow, for the most part, changes in stock prices, and not vice versa as it should be.

Experience teaches us that earnings estimates, especially those of a longer-term nature, are not particularly reliable.

It is more important to know what will happen than when it will happen, because it is impossible to forecast with precision the timing of critical events.

We should be very cautious in what we expect of our prescience.

When most people think about the future, they ignore that the future is a distribution of possibilities.

I figure that I want to swim as well as I can against the tides. I'm not trying to predict the tides.

I think I'm pretty good at long run expectations, but I don't think I'm good at short-term wobbles. I don't have the faintest idea what's going to happen short term.

I believe it's hard to predict the future. It's not that hard to predict the present. In other words, it's not that hard to understand what's going on today.

Most of the people who have accumulated the greatest wealth in this business have done so not by predicting the future, but by buying companies at such attractive prices, thereby discounting the majority of the problems people fear.

There is very little value added trying to predict where the market is going or guessing whether it’s overpriced or underpriced.

The principle of "managed" investment trusts is absolutely sound, granted only one premise. The premise is that there are somewhere people of such experience and insight that they can predict with some sort of accuracy the future behavior of securities.

Although expectations of the future are supposed to be the driving force in the capital markets, those expectations are almost totally dominated by memories of the past. Ideas, once accepted, die hard.

We don’t pay attention to quarterly earnings or consensus forecasts. That’s performance investing, not value investing.

Nobody knows what the stock market is going to do or even what it ought to do. Hence, the most valuable asset in all business, which is knowledge, is necessarily absent.

When picking a list of growth stocks for long-term investment, broad diversification of the risk is the first and most important principle to follow. No one can look ahead five or ten years and say what is the most promising industry or the best stock to own.

You never can predict the economy. You can't predict the stock market.

There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.

Attempting to guess short-term swings in individual stocks, the stock market or the economy is not likely to produce consistently good results. Short-term developments are too unpredictable.

We deceive ourselves when we believe that past stock market return patterns provide the bounds by which we can predict the future.

If you have an opinion about the level of prices, it should be an opinion based upon your concept of the values of securities in relation to price, rather than on any prophecy or expectation of changes or of the continuance of a given moment.

I am skeptical about stock market forecasting by anybody, and particularly by bankers.

The influence on stock prices are so numerous and so complex that no person has ever been able to predict the trend of stock prices with consistent success.

The actual results of an investment over a long term of years very seldom agree with the initial expectation.

I make no attempt to forecast the general market -- my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.

We don't buy and sell stocks based upon what other people think the stock market is going to do (I never have an opinion) but rather upon what we think the company is going to do.

While majority opinion can give any market movement considerable momentum that keeps it going in the same direction, majority opinion is inevitably and consistently wrong at turning points.

Stock prices reflect the obvious, not the obscure.

Forecasts usually tell us more about the forecaster than of the future.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

History does not tell you of future things happening.

In all my 55 years on Wall Street, before I retired to do something vastly more important, I was never able to say when the market would go up or down. Nor was I able to find anybody on Earth whose opinion I would value on the subject of when it would go up and down.

Our expectations of the future are not unbiased and do not reflect all available information.

In speaking of future prospects it is often difficult to make the distinction clear between what one considers the most desirable in the public interest and what one reckons to be the most probable in the actual circumstances. For unfortunately the course of events which is the most desirable is not always the most probable!

I am certainly not going to predict what general business or the stock market are going to do in the next year or two since I don't have the faintest idea.

In my view, predicting future private market value is like predicting future Dow Jones levels: It doesn't make any sense at all.

I deal in facts, not forecasting the future.

Even the most serious efforts to make predictions can end up so far from the mark as to be more dangerous than useless.

One point movements may be likened to the ripples of the stock market, whose occurrence may be influenced by so great a multitude of factors that it is impossible to forecast them. Ten-point movements may perhaps be compared to waves.

You can’t forecast multiples.

Corrections are unpredictable. By selling stocks to avoid pain, you can miss the next gain.

"This one is different," is the doomsayer's litany, and, in fact, every recession is different, but that doesn't mean it's going to ruin us.

Every recession brings out the skeptics who doubt that we will ever come out of it, and who predict that we will soon fall into a depression, when new cars will sit unsold in the showrooms forever and houses will stand empty, and the country will go bankrupt.

There are economic facts and there's economic predictions and economic predictions are a total waste.

No one can predict with any certainty which way the next 1,000 points will be. Market fluctuations, while no means comfortable, are normal.

In all my 60 years in the stock market, I never found anyone whose opinion of what the stock market would do next week or next month was worth heeding.

If we use prediction as the measure of a model, traditional finance makes precisely wrong predictions.

Extrapolation is usually right, but not valuable, and predictions of deviation from trends are potentially profitable but rarely right. So far, macro-economic forecasting doesn't represent the path to superior investments.

I've listened to a lot of economic briefings, and I've had a lot of visits from economists, and I've never encountered one who was right consistently.

Being "right" doesn't lead to superior performance if the consensus forecast is also right.

Most of us have roughly the same ability to predict the future. The trouble is, being right as often as the average forecaster won't produce superior results.

Extreme predictions are rarely right, but they're the ones that make you big money.

Potentially profitable, nonconsensus forecasts are very hard to believe in and act on for the simple reason that they are so far from conventional wisdom.

The trouble with market forecasting is not that it is done by unintelligent and unskillful people. Quite to the contrary, the trouble is that it is done by so many really expert people that their efforts constantly neutralize each other, and end up almost exactly in zero.

If we really knew what the future will bring that is all we would have to know; but since stock market people can only guess the future and since they have the embarrassing habit of guessing wrongly, it seems best not to lay too much stress upon forecasts.

It is a safe prediction for me to make that, in future years as in the past, common stocks will advance too far and decline too far, and that investors, like speculators -- and institutions, like individuals -- will have their periods of enchantment and disenchantment with equities.

No prediction -- whether of a repetition of past patterns or of a complete break with past patterns -- can be proved in advance to be right.

It is usually a much simpler matter to forecast a bull market than to call the turn at its end.

I didn't spend any time predicting the economy, or the stock market. I spent all my time looking at companies.

I've been fully invested at the start of all the major declines and I will be fully invested in the next one. I am not a market predictor, that's for darn sure.

Even in good markets we have declines and trying to predict its direction over the near term is an exercise in futility.

It would be very useful to know what the market is going to do. But unfortunately, of all the market corrections that have ever come, no one has been able to predict them.

Guessing at the future rate of interest is, in my opinion, one of the most puzzling problems in the world.

A lifetime of investment research has taught me to become more and more humble about making predictions.

Forecasting is a notoriously underpaid profession, and extremely risky to boot, so I avoid it.

No one, not even the most experienced trader, economist or businessman can predict with certainty the course of the stock market.

When it comes to statements about the future in the economic realm, none of us have knowledge in the scientific sense of the term. What we have is opinions and surmises -- let us hope, based upon adequate reflections and study.

Economic events rarely unfold in the way stock-market people forecast them.