One consequence of consistent writing is having a large number of data points on my past predictions. I can go back and see how often I am right.
There is predictive value in back testing is clear. And in five years of writing I have lots of opportunities to apply my current dilemmas and compare them to what I’ve seen. If you’ve not heard of back testing here is a little summary from my Claude query.
Backtesting is a form of retrodiction—a special case of cross-validation applied to past time periods, used across finance, meteorology (where it’s called “hindcasting”), and other modeling domains.
In investment contexts, the underlying logic is that if a strategy performed poorly historically, it’s unlikely to perform well going forward, and vice versa.
The year 2026 has gone pretty well for me. I’ve made some good calls even as other situations globally look very chaotic. I feel like I’ve largely published my predictions and taken my shots and this is working out for me. The more I can look back on where I’ve been the better I get at acting on my calls.
I do continue to wonder how much anyone is paying attention to anything even as a huge amount of attention is being paid to manifestations that are only being seen as secondary or tertiary effects of bigger geopolitical and monetary events.
I don’t know if going into the future this corpus of guessing and noting and committing to thinking on the issues of the day will matter. Or might make life worse. But tomorrow on day 2027 maybe I’ll learn something new and put it into action and continue turning myself with the tides.