The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions

by William A. Sherden

An ambitious, intelligent, and very readable guide to understanding our present and our future."-Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible
No one can foretell the future. Or can they? There are many who purport to-and they are making a fortune. From meteorologists to investment advisers, prognosticating professionals are part of a multibillion-dollar industry. No longer merely fortunetellers, they are fortune sellers, offering us a commodity we're more than eager to the future.
In this piercing and provocative expose, business consultant and forecasting expert William Sherden casts an unblinking eye on the booming business of predicting the future, separating fact from fallacy to show us not only how best to use the forecasts we're given, but how to "select the nuggets of valuable future advice from amongst the $200 billion worth of mostly erroneous future predictions put forth each year.

Genres: Business, Economics, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 1997

Reviews

[Michael]

Abandoned 2021 - Pretty shallow, and too dated to be worth putting time into at this point.

[George Goodall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's face it. As a species, we suck at making predictions. Sherden's book explores this phenomenon by exploring a variety of different specialists: meteorologists, economists, futurists, strategic managers, etc. His observations are remarkably consistent. Most predictions are wrong but there *might* be value in the process of creating them. This book is dated but provides some interesting history. If you like Nate Silver, Nassim Taleb, or Philip Tetlock, you will appreciate Sherden's contribution.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly slightly outdated, but fairly entertaining. I fundamentally agree with Sherden's argued premise, but I do find that he oversells his position occasionally.

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a couple of years ago, and I have it on hand as I write this review.

Predicting the future is a booming business. In a typical day, we hear weather forecasts, forecasts about the economy and financial markets, and social predictions. The author asks: How good are our modern day soothsayers? The author gives a highly skeptical answer: only one day ahead weather forecasts and the aging of the population can be counted on; the rest are about as reliable as the fifty-fifty odds in flipping a coin.

The author looks at professional stock pickers. The book has a chart (p.108) of the percentage of equity mutual funds outperformed by the S&P 500 Index for years 1984 to 1995. From what I can tell, the professionally managed equity mutual funds were outperformed by the S&P 500 Index in 9 of those 12 years. And in many of those years, over 70 percent of equity mutual funds under-performed the index.

Another chapter looks at the claims by futurists. Often they were wrong, or totally missed something. The book _Powershift_ by the futurist Alvin Toffler came out in 1990. I read that book. In a sense, a powershift did occur, but not in the way Toffler envisioned. In that book, Toffler did not mention the internet at all, and thus did not see the ramifications the internet would have. An academic by the name of Ravi Batra predicted in his book _The Great Depression of 1990_ a "..a worldwide depression...it will occur in 1990 and plague the world through at least 1996." Actually the 90s were a boom decade for the US and other countries.

In another chapter, the author, who is a business consultant, looks at management theories. My gut feeling for some time was that business management is a fad riddled field, and this book validated my intuition.

The book gives other examples of the failure of modern day fortune tellers; with the examples I gave, I hope you get the drift. The author attempts a theoretical framework as to why consistently successful prediction involving human affairs is impossible: society is a complex system. Many factors are involved in a situation; human actors adapt; knowledge influences human decisions, and since the growth of knowledge is unpredictable, the future course of history is unpredictable.

[Caly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent history of forecasting across meteorology, economics, technology and society. However, the author seems to think that past forecasting failures somehow prove perfect prediction to be an impossible goal. This is both illogical and overly fatalistic. Past failures merely reflect the limitations of those forecasting methods used, not the limitations of possible methods that may be developed in the future. The tenability of this pessimistic view is also damaged by the recent discovery of superforecasters by Tetlock in the Good Judgement Project. All in all, I expect the development of more sophisticated forecasting techniques and information gathering and analysis technology to render the core message of this book irrelevant with time.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd actually give this book 2.5 stars, but we round up in my family. The premis of the book is given in the introduction: people who make predictions are frauds. Throughout the rest of the book the author sets out to prove this using seven fields where predictions are prevalent, and he is very convincing. My problem with the book was that it sometimes dragged, and my mind would wander. But for the most part it was pretty good.

[Satrio Adi · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I remember after I finish this book is that prediction requires 2 things:

1. Natural law that governs things we try to predict.
2. Determining point A (anchor point) which will be used to predict point B (things we try to predict).

The most interesting chapters are the first two chapters.

Simply a great book for those who are working in stock market.