Be trusted to stock market predictions

We constantly hear predictions on what next for the stock market, house prices and much more (some of them are reported on the site). Here, TiM gives its a 30-second view on who you should trust...

So which predictions can you trust?
Be trusted to stock market predictions is very few. Many experts and pundits have a vested interest in talking a particular market up or down. Or sometimes it's nothing more than a sub-conscious bias.

Most fund managers, for instance, operate in a culture where stock markets are king. And we don't need to tell you that estate agents feel compelled talking up the property market (many of them honestly believe what they're telling you).

You may begin to notice the strange coincidence that many of stock market predictions are based on the recent average returns: an 'expert' in his field subconsciously knows what returns should be and merely applies it to the future.

So according to the FSA, the best guidance for stock market returns is around 6% or 7%. You'll therefore find that most of the FTSE 100 predictions for 2010 will suggest a rise from around 5,500 to around 5,900, which is a 7% rise.

There's some guilty parties here and even many readers are guilty of the same - see here.

Every year that I've covered stock market predictions, the most popular answer nearly every year is 7% up.

What about those who have made correct calls before?
Those are the ones that This is Money is most interested in. Our aim is to tell our readers when the world's most successful investors give their opinions - the likes of billionaires such as Warren Buffett or George Soros or fund managers with a proven track record of getting it right, such as Anthony Bolton or Neil Woodford.

The next most important views are from those who have made correct calls, but have no track record of performance to prove it. They deserve a little more caution. In this pack we'd include US economist Nouriel Roubini who saw the financial crisis of 2008 coming well in advance.

It's worth noting that Roubini has been warning the stock market rally would end from the moment it began in March 2008. He's been wrong so far, but may still be proved right.

So they've got it right once, but might not do so again?
That's bang on. Some market calls come right more by luck than judgement. The bottom line is that markets, by nature, are erratic and unpredictable. Nassim Taleb explains this well with his Black Swan Theory - a Black Swan event is when a rare, impossible to predict event occurs.

He has a book of the same name and another called Fooled by Randomness . That titles sums up the sort of cyncism all readers should arm themselves with when reading predictions on financial publications (including this one).

See also why stock market predictions are so often misses the...