The Wednesday Briefs – Evaluation Update 1

In our August 2021 evaluation of The Wednesday Briefs under the headline Are The Wednesday Briefs Worth Reading?, we concluded that The Wednesday Briefs made a large number of accurate predictions. Separating the survey by topic, we included excerpts from previous issues that had proved prescient. We encourage you to read or re-read the first evaluation. We include those excerpts below again.

We also accepted that not everything had been perfect. For example, we were too optimistic about the pandemic. We thought and hoped that the numbers of cases and deaths would be far lower than they turned out to be, and that the pandemic would fade faster than it did. We had little precedent to go on and hoped for the best.

The other place where we stumbled or thought that we had stumbled, in the issues preceding that August 2021 evaluation, was on the question of inflation. Here we quote from our post back then: “We called it right but overworried a bit about inflation”. As we all know now, we had not in fact overworried about inflation, but were unfortunately correct to worry. It just took longer for inflation to show up in the official numbers.

Net net therefore, our main miss before August 2021 was about the pandemic. Not a negligible miss, but again one with little precedent in our collective experience.

Let us now examine the record since August 2021, using the same template of topics (POLITICS, MARKETS, ECONOMY) that we used in the first post and substituting “GEOPOLITICS” for “PANDEMIC”. The first is heating up while the second is subsiding.

Read more

The Wednesday Briefs – An Evaluation

Perfection is unattainable, but the track record has been solid and consistent.

The Wednesday Briefs are not primarily about forecasting but about providing unique commentary and insight on current affairs. But this commentary and this insight have sometimes come hand in hand with making forecasts.

Described by a regular reader as a “weekly gift and a treat”, the Wednesday Briefs are thought-provoking and enjoyable to many. But are they worth reading as a forecasting source? Below are excerpts from the various Briefs over the past seventeen months. We were too optimistic about the pandemic’s longevity but mostly right about other things.

Read more