I have also decided to leave Goldman Sachs, as of midnight Sunday. I waited long enough. It was painful watching those guys rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars, while I sat in the back reading The Wall Street Journal for Dummies. They didn’t care about clients, and they didn’t care about me. To them, I was Johnny the Bagel Boy. Johnny get me this. Johnny get me that. Johnny-Boy, I’ll take a pumpernickel with a low-fat schmear.
It was never about clients. It was always about food. They always had to have something to eat. It was disgusting, the crumbs on the keyboards, the half-filled coffee cups lined up along the window sills, so that if anyone did jump, he would get drenched on his way down. But any jumper would probably land on me, coming back from the deli with my arms full. It would serve them right, their coffee would be cold.
They can all starve, those people at Goldman Sachs, for all I care. I never told anyone this, but one day I spit in everyone’s coffee cup as I was going up the elevator back to the office. That was a good one, watching all those pinheads making a million dollars an hour drinking my special blend.
I hope that all the clients that got screwed by Goldman Sachs can take a little pleasure knowing that Johnny the Bagel Boy was watching out for them. I got ’em good, probably better than the SEC will. Maybe I can get a job at the SEC now.
Well, thanks for listening to my story, and I hope it goes viral. Yours truly, Johnny.
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.