Super Forecasting

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The Living Force
I was going to post this on the covid thread but I think it deserves it's own thread for searchability reasons.

So I heard an interesting term today from a talk I sat in on by a fund manager. It turns out a huge part of these guys job is forecasting i.e. predicting the future. In a way, you can say people like Laura and co are in that business as well except in our case, it's not too particular, mathematics is not employed, utilising the insights to create or manipulate markets is not the aim etc.

In searching more about this, this is what I've found. The US government and intelligence community put out a contract for forecasters a number of years ago in which a number of organisations and groups joined the research project. The aim was to create a team of people who could predict the future more accurately than a given baseline. The baseline they used is the "wisdom of crowds" i.e. that is if you poll or ask a huge crowd about something, collate the answers and work out the median. It turns out this median is usually closer to the truth than any answer you could get from a single person or expert etc.

In any case, as the research went on, the groups or people who weren't good were kicked out. They eventually found that even amongst the good ones, there were those who could consistently outperform the rest and produce more accurate predictions. What did the gov do next? They took all these "super forecasters" and put them into one group to see what the results were of having a team comprised of such people.

Looks like super forecasting is also turning into an industry in itself

 
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