[peteretep]

    > but it by no means marks the bottom

If you know with any degree of certainty at all which way an asset will move, you stand to make a gigantic amount of money. Everybody you have ever heard telling you which way an asset is moving is guessing just as much as people who tell you it's going to move the other way.

[winfred]

It isn't as much the fact that the asset will move, as the direction and the timeline that matters, as well as the availability of investment vehicles. If I'd wanted to profit on the knowledge that coal will go down, I'd have to short the stock which isn't free, so it is important for me to know on what time frame it will go down (if I knew it would go up, but not on what time frame, it would work just fine). Another example, I know lithium (the commodity) is going to go up, but 90% of the lithium market is dominated by 3 companies, each of which get less than 20% of their revenue from lithium mining, meaning I have no way of profiting from my knowledge.

[peteretep]

Top tip: if you're willing to forgo the timeframe, it's possible to become a super-genius stock picker. I GUARANTEE you that the US stock market will crash!*

* Sometime, one day, in the future