Market Forecasts

Predicting market movements is the philosopher’s stone of finance: Many have looked for it, many have claimed to find it, none truly has and if any did, markets would probably crash. However imperfect as it may be, it is still a worthy endeavour, the pursuit of which provides interesting insights into science, human nature and, of course, how both combine in financial markets. The section below provides a list of such tentative exercises as could be found by the author of this website. Their presence below should not be considered an endorsement of their conclusions, forecasts or advices, but rather as an expression of interest and curiosity in their methods and aspirations.

It may be that some of these forecasts will on occasion hit the mark and accurately predict a peak or a trough. However, it may not be possible to exclude the possibility that a successful forecast was caused by the unavoidable coincidence brought about by a law of large numbers. If you shoot enough bullets one will inevitably hit the mark.

With all this in mind please have a look at the following efforts, they are quite interesting:

 

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH)

Financial Crisis Observatory: Highlights, Financial Bubble Reports (I, II & III) & FBE Blog, Market Anxiety Measures [VIX (explanation) & TED Spread (explanation)]

• The Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) is a scientific platform aimed at testing and quantifying rigorously, in a systematic way and on a large scale the hypothesis that financial markets exhibit a degree of inefficiency and a potential for predictability, especially during regimes when bubbles develop.

Risk Centre:  News & Events, Research, Seminar Series, Publications

• The aim of the Risk Center’s activities will be to build an integrated view of risk landscapes and develop the means to understand, assess, compare and manage these. Its research output will help societies to better manage risk portfolios and to design novel solutions and collaborative risk reduction schemes. With the Risk Center ETH Zurich joins a growing revolution which approaches risk in an interdisciplinary manner to address issues faced by society today and in the decades to come.