Forecasting is a necessary evil in investing. The very act of investing is an exercise in making assumption about future events. If you didn’t expect to book a profit, presumably you wouldn’t make the trade. The trouble starts when you move beyond this basic axiom and start making decisions about how to forecast, what to forecast, and over what time frame. But none of this changes the basic truism that risk is easier to forecast than return. There are caveats, of course, but even small relative advantages can be useful at times.

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