November 23, 2018
In November of 2010 I griped that the paper kept printing holiday
shopping forecasts that wildly fluctuated from day to day, and said that they should
just print the results in January and save newsprint in the meantime.
On November 22, 2018 the Post-Dispatch ran a column by Barry
Ritholtz, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, who explains why the predictions go
up and down. He says it’s because the numbers are based on surveys, not data;
and people don’t really remember how much they spent last year and won’t
predict well how much they’ll spend this year, so it’s really all guesswork.
It’s nice to have that mystery solved.
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