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Reading the Tea Leaves

People love a prediction - whether it's the weather, or your horoscope, most of us are a sucker for a confidently delivered prognostication.  However many of those predictions are never checked against reality, and if they were would fall at not just the first hurdle, but bump along the ground having thoroughly disappointed.  Luckily it's a rare horoscope that is checked for accuracy.  Not so for stock market predictions - here the tradition is not only for every commentator who you'll listen to, to make predictions at the end of the year, but to look back at last year's and see whether they were the mutterings of a blatant charlatan, or the wise words of an ancient oracle.  Commentators can be oracle one year, and charlatan the next, but it appears not to cause them stress, or reduce the fascination by which we examine their guesses.  Here Jim Parker, Vice President at Dimensional Fund Advisors, reviews some of the predictions of 2017, and ruthlessly refuses to make similar predictions for 2018.

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by John Stirling