Full of bull

By Shawn Langlois, MarketWatch

Hey, don’t let a few market hiccups to start the year bum you out too much. Strategists predict gains by the end of the year! Just like they did last year. And the year before that. And the year before that, all the way back to 1998, according to one Georgetown professor who crunched the numbers during that time frame to come to this conclusion: The Wall Street pros are “full of bull.”

Salil Mehta, in a deep dive for the Statistical Ideas blog, examined 186 public forecasts, which he culled from 19 years of media coverage. For starters, the strategists have called for a positive year more than 95% of the time, while the market has only been up 73% of the time.

So...analysts pretty much say the same thing no matter what.  They are usually not traders themselves, so they dont have real experience.   They prefer to predict gains so they can be positive petes, since noone likes a negative nancy.  they simply extrapolate good trends or consider downturns to be temporary, to hold onto an  extrapolated trend they are married to.

The best advise i can give is to either save your money in gauranteed, low return assets or follow the advice of a consistently profitable trader.  Listening to advisors, analysts and random other people will keep your gains random, messy, volatile, unpredictable and  emotionally driven.  Do you ask random people to perform surgery on u?  No, u get a surgeon.  Dont ask random people to tell u where to put ur money.  Get a trader.  So much logic is lost when people handle wealth.