• It has been a wonderful, warm, green, revitalizing spring here in the mountains. I hope you have been enjoying yours.
• One thing that always manages to irritate me is hearing a politician speak for the “American People”. The American People know this, the American People want that. What it really means: I think this, I want that, and if you don’t vote for me, who are you?
• Another reliable irritant for me is the Fashion and Style section of The New York Times. Its latest polemic against living sensibly is this feature on “photographer” Maxwell Snow, by Jacob Bernstein, son of Carl. (I know you’ve heard of one of them.) The article is titled, “Life on the Other Side of the Lens: Maxwell Snow, Photographer, Sets His Demons Aside.” Maxwell’s demons seem to have Manhattan sensibilities: “Eventually, the stars aligned, and Mr. Snow and [his fiance] Ms. Traina went on their first date — to Omen, a Japanese restaurant in SoHo that’s popular with fashion types partly because it does not serve rice with the sashimi.” All I can say is, please.
• Sometimes I like to say things to irritate my wife, just for the sake of seeing her reaction. Like, “I wonder if Hooters has an early-bird special.” I was thinking her reaction to this might be, “Why don’t you go find out?” Her actual response was not so different, except the sarcasm was much less subtle.
• If you google the phrase “May 8 North Carolina,” the first site listed is a group opposed to the proposed North Carolina constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, or any other “domestic legal union” that does not involve a man and a woman. Conservatives in this state craftily scheduled the referendum on the amendment for the same day as the Republican presidential primary, when few Democrats would normally be expected to go to the polls. Take America Back, indeed.
• What part of “no pre-existing conditions” do the opponents of health care reform dislike? Seems to me that the most common and crippling disability in the U.S. may be the inability to walk in someone else’s shoes. (For more evidence of same, see previous item.)
• “What I am accused of is macaroni and cheese!” Another product of a strange dream. It’s like we all go on acid trips every night when we fall asleep.
• I am reading a primer on graphic design — its author maintains that typing two spaces after a period is obsolete. I know that web browsers routinely compress strings of spaces down to a single one, but that doesn’t mean such a rule should apply to all text. If you think this blog is dense now, imagine what it would be like if I didn’t add those spaces.
• “The Walking Dead” would be more entertaining if the zombies wore designer clothes and staggered around in stiletto heels. Think, “Stiffs in the City”.
• Unlike Facebook, you don’t need to log out from this site. This isn’t the Soviet Union, and there’s no Berlin Wall confining you to East German desolation. You are free to go.
I am one who believes that financial markets are chaotic — highly sensitive to changes in sentiment and economic conditions, so much so that the future is essentially unpredictable.
But that doesn’t stop people (or me) from making guesses. For many years now, my old friend Tom Campbell has been making educated guesses using mathematical models of his own design, and he now publishes his predictions on his web page. I wish him good fortune, but I have also expressed to him my skepticism about the value of such forecasts.
So let’s have a little contest to see if my skepticism is well-deserved, or if Tom has indeed come up with the Holy Grail of forecasting that investors have sought for decades. Below, you will see a list of Tom’s most recently published forecasts — I extracted these values from the charts on his website. At the end of the year, I will bring this post back to the top and, assuming Tom is still updating his figures, we can see how he did. I’m going to guess that Tom will get one or two of these about right. I will publicly congratulate him if he is more accurate than that.
Forecasts for January 1, 2013, taken from AAFORECAST.COM on March 20, 2012:
Without doing any modeling, my guess is that the unemployment rate will be a few tenths higher than what Tom predicts, the S&P 500 will be about 1360-1380, and the Gold ETF will be roughly where it is now or a bit lower (say 15.75-16.00). See you at year’s end.