Apprenticed Investor: The Folly of Forecasting

As a chartered member of the chattering class, I am all too familiar with the "perils of predictions." Anyone who works in the financial field and speaks to the press eventually gets tagged for a market forecast gone awry. It's an occupational hazard.

Unfortunately, investors all too often give these "predictions" in print or on TV far more weight than they should. It's very easy for a confident-sounding analyst, fund manager or professor to say something on TV that can throw off the best laid plans of investors.

I wish an SEC-mandated disclosure accompanied all pundit forecasts: "The undersigned states that he has no idea what's going to happen in the future, and hereby declares that this prediction is merely a wildly unsupported speculation." ...