Why Prediction Fails

Wall Street employs thousands of analysts producing millions of forecasts. Their track record at predicting major turning points? Essentially zero.

No major firm predicted the 2008 crash. No model foresaw COVID's market impact. Nobody called the exact start of the dot-com bust.

The reason is mathematical: Black Swans live in "Extremistan" — Taleb's term for domains where single events can dominate everything. Normal distributions (bell curves) don't apply. A single day can move markets more than the previous 100 days combined.