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by simianwords 5 days ago
1. Make a prediction about bubble

2. Get it wrong

3. Excuse yourself by claiming market is irrational

1 comments

That is the quote of famous financial advisor made in 1986. It keeps being repeated, because bubbles and their pops and irrational markets are frequent enough.

There is nothing controversial about claim that markets are irrational, bubbles pop impossible to predict while bubble being visible. Previous bubbles were the same.

The problem with this type of thinking is that it deliberately ignores the times that bubbles were predicted incorrectly.

Imagine there was a guy. He kept predicting that a war may happen in 1 year. Keeps getting it wrong. In 59 a years a war does happen. He then retroactively justifies his wrong predictions by claiming “but people are irrational and it’s hard to predict”.

Past bubbles I read about were recognized correctly for years before they popped. The pop was hard to predict, the bubble was routinelly recognized. These were not wrong prections, these were correct assesments of the situation. Bubble exists before it pops.

Markets being irrational is again, nothing controversial.

That is history. Your war predicting guy is a made up analogy. And he may just be correct about his assesment of the situation - war is being actively planned and prepared, actors want it and we are all waiting till Trump or Hitler or whoever decides that "now".

With respect to Zitron, he has timed it as another commenter pointed out and his timing was incorrect.
Yes. And he stopped making predictions after, which is literally "learning from the experience and maybe even studied a bit more". He openly talked about the fact he expected it to pop sooner on podcast.

He is not giving investment advice, in any case.

What advice is he giving? Basically nothing.

You can’t keep saying bubble will pop and then retract. People catch on.

I can predict that the market will both go up and down and be right. What makes my claim true or not is the attached time value.

Zitron's claims are wrong even if the AI bubble ultimately pops. Being directionally right about stuff like this is worse than useless and makes people overcredulous of the other side.