MIRA BENE, SBAGLIA POCO

il 30 dicembre u.s. sul nyt è comparso quest'articolo, a sua volta articolato in dieci interventi, in cui ci si chiedeva " Even though prognostications turn out to be wrong as often as they are right, why do they have such enduring appeal? What purpose have they served, from ancient times to our information age?".
la risposta:

... to give ourselves the feeling of control over our fate ... to help you decide between alternative courses of action, or because you just have to know.

tra gli intervenuti c'era anche il prof shiller (che ogni buon trader dovrebbe conoscere e temere perchè spesso il suo prezzario determina repentini movimenti sui mercati) il quale scrive:

On economic predictions, statisticians and econometricians have some tools that can help forecast conditions, but they are rough. With "time series analysis," which uses data collected over time, one can see patterns, for example, of growth trends interrupted by recessions and recoveries. But that method can't handle any revolutions, breakthroughs or fundamental change in the way data are generated. The failure to predict the current financial crisis could be considered one of these cases. Statisticians and econome-tricians can get the direction of the trend right but be off by a mile as to the level.  One of the 1931 forecasters for the New York Times predicted that the U.S. population would be 160 million in 2011. We are almost twice that number. The error in the growth rate is less than 1 percent a year, but 1 percent accumulates into a big difference in level over 80 years...

più fortunate sembrano le "predictions" nella c.d. information technologies:

This observation goes well beyond Moore’s Law ... What’s predictable is that these measures grow exponentially, not linearly, though our intuition about the future is linear, which is hard-wired in our brains. This makes a remarkable difference. Thirty steps linearly gets you to 30, whereas 30 steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16. . .) gets you to a billion. This “law of accelerating returns,” as I call it, tells us that any area of information technology will grow enormously in power while becoming ever smaller in size. This law has continued for the three decades since I first noticed it, and goes back decades before that...Over the past two decades, I’ve made hundreds of predictions based on the law of accelerating returns. Of 147 predictions for 2009 that I made in “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” which I wrote in the 1990s, 78 percent were correct as of the end of 2009, and an additional 8 percent were off by a year or two. The closer I stayed to just predicting the underlying price/performance and capacity of information technologies, the more accurate the predictions were.The law of accelerating returns is the only reliable method...In another quarter century, that capability will fit inside a red blood cell and will again be a billion times more powerful per dollar.

le market predictions sono in gran parte votate all'ottimismo (più o meno sano e/con tg più o meno spinti) per il primo semestre dell'anno (a proposito su borsa&finanza del 31 dicembre u.s. a pag. 33 c'è un intervento di francesco caruso di cui riporto un pezzettino. a chi fosse interessato alle nostre (predictions) rinviamo all'aggiornamento del 18 dicembre u.s., qui sintetizzate graficamente con i nostri tg annuali, ripeto annuali, di massima per il dax. sorrido)

in attesa di verificarne sul campo la bontà e pregandovi di osservare bene questa classifica (sorrido), non ci resta che guardare per un momento al passato e più precisamente all'ultima stagione di trimestrali americane. nell'occasione avevamo segnalato un titolo che ci sembrava particolarmente interessante: MON. ecco come si è comportato dopo l'uscita della sua trimestrale (6 ottobre u.s.). ottimo investimento (ha quintuplicato la perfomance dell'indice di riferimento) e discreta allocazione €/$, sorrido.

la via di mezzo. settimana di ism e indici occupazionali quindi con tanta carne al fuoco.

e ora pronti, mezzo, via e in bocca al lupo per questo 2011.