Where the puck? How the big picture can help direct our play

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A future of fewer babies, older people and smarter machines should inform our investment decisions, writes Adrian Saville

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The seduction of forecasting is the precision with which it parades, and the confidence that forecasts instil in decision makers, says the writer. Picture: 123RF/ Artem Egorov

However, in applying Gretzky’s principle of figuring out the future, a material danger immediately presents itself in the form of forecasting. The seduction of forecasting is the precision with which it parades, and the confidence that forecasts instil in decision makers. Yet the risk — indeed, the tragedy — is that people are overwhelmingly weak in this “exact science”. As David Epstein noted in a recent article inThe Atlantic: “The track record of expert forecasters … is dismal.

However, as much as hanging onto point forecasts can feed poor investment decisions, a variation on Gretzky’s point is that if we can’t figure out the exact future location of the puck, perhaps working out its general travel direction could give us a powerful information advantage. As John Maynard Keynes put it: “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

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