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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

For people with the intellect to understand the economy it does. Just very few of those people

If this was true wouldn’t you have many more economists with multiple mullions just from market timing? Even if you can predict the market and you are correct it can stay irrational so i think this comment is completely incorrect

No becabuse academic credentials don’t mean anything

Yes, and they do work for fixed income hedge funds.

That's more of an indictment of the field of economics than anything else. The most talented leave to make better money in markets and hedge funds and the remaining academics get to set our public policy. There are plenty of consistently performing funds. Successful "applied economists" include Ray Dalio and Jim Simons.

Maybe the economists who study asset pricing in financial markets should, but that's just one subfield among many. No one is beating the S&P with their knowledge of Japanese labor market dynamics or the 19th century Spanish wool industry.

Those who understand the economy know it's a poor predictor of market returns.

They don’t understand the economy then, they just know how to analyze it in hindsight

Stock market prices are based on expected future returns. Any anticipated future economic movement is more or less priced in. You can have a perfect understanding of the economy and not be able to predict future market movements as large short term movements in stocks are in response to unpredicted events.

Same as every economist

This statement is (likely) unfalsifiable. That is, it would have to come from someone who does this successfully, and could offer up some evidence of having done it, and what system and logic they use to understand the economy and thus know when equities are high and low, when to sit on the sidelines, etc.

Few people doing so well would share such a process, but in theory, if they did, and it worked, it would likely trigger a flood of followers, and the behavior of the markets would shift alongside it.

Presumably someone making this claim is a billionaire. Or they've being doing well in stocks for a short enough time that it's yet to be proven if they are as good at timing the markets as they think they are.

People like George soros, bill gross, a bunch of them

> people with the intellect to understand the economy

Those people (we people) know not to try.

No there are people that can time the market.

There are people that have timed the market, but we can't distinguish if that came from actual predictive ability or just getting lucky.

And if it did come from predictive ability, then everyone would just copy their predictions and arbitrage it out.

People successfully time the market all the time (some more than others). Only fools broadcast their intentions.

If they are broadcasting it, the broadcast is part of the strategy.

> No there are people that can time the market.

The guy who could died last year.[1]

[1] https://dailyprofitcycle.com/market-commentary/the-legacy-of...

Such as?

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