I mentioned Phil Tetlock the other day in my article Daytrading Has Been Dead For At Least 20 Years – Mutual Funds Even Longer at The Business Insider and got a few email responses about him.
Read this interesting piece about his work from The New Yorker:
“More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.”
All I can add is that most profitable trader I know that trades prop capital only, managed a bar 25 years ago. He can barely use a computer, yet he outperforms all {not some} of my colleagues who have advanced degrees. I’ll let the reader draw their own conclusions.