Do Financial Gurus Produce Reliable Forecasts?

Abstract

Many investors rely on market experts and forecasters when making investment decisions, such as when to buy or sell securities. Ranking and grading market forecasters provides investors with metrics on which they may choose forecasters with the best record of accuracy for their particular market exposure. This study develops a novel ranking methodology to rank the market forecaster. In particular, we distinguish forecasts by their specificity, rather than considering all predictions and forecasts equally important, and we also analyze the impact of the number of forecasts made by a particular forecaster. We have applied our methodology on a dataset including 6,627 forecasts made by 68 forecasters.

Keywords: Marker forecasters ranking; Guru ranking; Market forecast

JEL Classification: G0, G1, G2, G15, G24, E44