The Prediction Polka
December 20, 2018·6 comments·Money
Every year, the financial industry produces thousands of predictions on markets, recessions, and economic outcomes. Asset managers, economists, and strategists deliver year-end forecasts with confidence and specificity. Yet nobody actually uses them. Asset allocation models aren't adjusted based on these predictions. Client portfolios don't shift because of year-end S&P 500 targets. This massive production of content that influences nothing reveals something odd about how the financial industry actually operates.
• Predictions flow through the system with ritualistic precision, but they're not meant to inform investment decisions. They're sales tools designed to make clients feel like their managers are plugged in and thinking ahead. The mechanism is universal: everyone knows these predictions won't be accurate, yet everyone participates in producing them.
• The contradiction runs deeper than simple inaccuracy. The financial industry treats predictions as if they're research and analysis. Internally, managers understand they're performance theater. This gap between what's presented and what's known creates a peculiar dynamic where the entire ecosystem depends on the pretense.
• What drives this isn't a coordinated campaign to mislead. It's something more fundamental: in an industry built on expectations management, producing predictions has become the thing everyone must do to appear informed to clients. Not producing them signals incompetence, regardless of whether they'll be used.
• The real cost of the Prediction Polka isn't the time wasted on inaccurate forecasts. It's that an enormous portion of financial services energy goes into creating content that serves no analytical purpose but must be created anyway. This machinery runs independent of its utility.
• If predictions aren't informing decisions and everyone knows this, what purpose does the system actually serve?The question raises something uncomfortable about how much of the financial advice industry exists to generate the appearance of expertise rather than to deliver it.
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Comments
We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves.” –Rochefoucauld Maximes 11
The CEO, the monk and the Christian…And when the CEO gets in the elevator with us, and then a monk on the next floor, the same sorts of things are going on in each of our heads. I say the monk doesn’t get it because he’s abandoned too much that is pleasurable in the this material world. The CEO doesn’t think any of us get it because we don’t have two vacation homes and a yacht. And the Christian looks down at us because they know that Jesus is the answer.
We’re all subscribed to our own little fantasies, and they all result in squirts of pleasure. We like knowing that we’re part of a small group that “gets it”.
I’m sure you see the Morgan Creek quarterly letters. Lol
Cannot recall the source or exact phrasing but “many words have gone by trying to prove that money doesn’t matter” is my antidote to that occasional “gets it” feeling. Cheers!
Predictions are an attempt to generate transactions. I can remember as a bulge bracket junk bond trader, at a firm I will not disclose, listening to the morning commentary. We would joke about how many hands the economist/strategist/allocator/analyst had and which sentence or two any given salesman would use to drive a trade that sold down our inventory. Scary hilarious mostly because it worked and I imagine still does.
Brands promoting narratives is an ancient practice on this planet. What’s been recently game changing (and accelerating) is the intersection between technology and narrative diffusion. Quid is a truly fascinating platform in this regard. Narratives about narratives. Very meta.
This is why I like to say that a great sales or marketing staff will almost always trump a great investment staff in terms of raising capital from investors. People prefer a good narrative or story to data or analytics.
One of the reasons markets tend to be so volatile is because they trade based more on expectations than fundamentals and investor expectations are often at odds with reality. Much of the financial services industry revolves around expectations management. And when everyone is forced to deal with an unknown future, that expectations management is really more about being a storyteller than anything. --A Wealth of Common Sense
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