This may come as no surprise to you but… market predictions are irrelevant.
Wall St. Is at It Again, Making Irrelevant Market Predictions [The New York Times] – “How wrong can these guesses be? Paul Hickey, a founder of Bespoke Investment Group, compared the yearly Wall Street predictions and actual market results starting with the forecast for Dec. 31, 2000.
He found that the Wall Street consensus only ever predicted gains, every single year, of about 8.8 percent on average. Of course, there were big losses in some years, as well as larger-than-expected rallies in others, so the variance between actual annual performance and the prediction was huge — an average gap of 14.2 percentage points.”
14.2%!!!! That’s terrible!