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New Memo from Howard Marks: The Illusion of Knowledge

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Jacob Wolinsky
Published on
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I’ve been expressing my disregard for forecasts for almost as long as I’ve been writing my memos, starting with The Value of Predictions, or Where’d All This Rain Come From in February 1993. Over the years since then, I’ve explained at length why I’m not interested in forecasts – a few of my favorite quotes echoing my disdain head the sections below – but I’ve never devoted a memo to explaining why making helpful macro forecasts is so difficult. So here it is.

Food for Thought

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

– John Kenneth Galbraith

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Jacob Wolinsky is the ex-Founder of Valuewalk.com (founded 2011, sold 2023). He is founder of HedgeFundAlpha (formerly ValueWalk Premium), a hedge fund focused intelligence service for institutional investors. Prior to founding Valuewalk, Jacob worked as an equity analyst covering small caps, a micro-cap analyst, doing member development a large hedge fund community and freelance financial writing. Jacob lives with his wife and five kids in Passaic NJ. - Email: jacob(at)hedgefundalpha.com. For confidential inquires email me for my Signal id. Other methods of secure communication are also available. FD: I almost exclusively avoid the purchase of equities to avoid conflict of interest and any insider information. I only purchase broad-based ETFs and mutual funds. I will disclsoe if I have a stake in any company, but in general avoid