Gyroscopic Investing

Here's an interesting bill (in Romania). Prison time for fortune tellers if their predictions don't come true.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/world ... tches.html

I wonder if this could set a precedent for financial gurus and fund managers who make bad predictions?

Gumby wrote: I wonder if this could set a precedent for financial gurus and fund managers who make bad predictions?

What's your prediction on that?

That reminds me of the question put to LaToya Jackson about whether any of her clairvoyant colleagues foresaw the bankruptcy of the Psychic Friends Network.

I had a friend go to a palm reader one time and he told me about it.  I asked him what the palm reader told him.  He told me she said he had a Florida vacation in his future.  This prediction proved to be false.

Another friend went to a palm reader in the French Quarter in New Orleans and she told him he was going to die soon.  It messed up the rest of his trip because he was a little spooky about that sort of thing.  That was 16 years ago and he is still alive, though, so I guess I would score that one as a miss.

Perhaps the finest and most textured depiction of a fortune teller was the Wizard of Oz.  He had a pretty good grasp of the way the whole racket is supposed to work.

As Charles Mackay wisely noted in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, at the root of most delusion is some combination of the desire to avoid work, cheat death and know the future.  I don't think it's an accident that most get rich quick schemes prey on the first and third of these desires.