That's not exactly true. I was talking with a trader friend of mine last fall about the real estate collapse that was just getting underway (finally -- that's an event my coworkers and I had seen coming for at least a couple of years), and we both agreed without equivocation that there was going to be a recession this year. Knowing that in advance doesn't automatically give you knowledge of a profitable series of trades to make. For instance, if we'd both shorted the S&P 500 on that day, we'd have been crying uncle the very next day when it shot up 3%, or a couple of weeks later when it peaked even higher.

Also, there's a difference between knowing something and being willing to risk losing a ton of money if you're wrong.

To support pg's point, unless your product takes a couple of lazy weekends to slap together, there's really no way of knowing where the economy will be once you're ready to go live.

And for that matter, weren't a number of successful dot-coms founded in the middle of the 2001-2002 recession? It seems to me that if you've spotted a good opportunity, the gyrations of industrial giants shouldn't really matter much to you. Even if your customers are businesses, your product should offer better value for less money than something they're already using, recession or no. A recession will, if anything, make them more receptive to such a product.

predictions overlap hope mixed with feelings which is surpressed by logic vs risk, therefore acting on a predictions is a tottaly different task.