Is that remotely plausible? How the hell would they know any better than meterologists? Some direct line to a wise old farmer who can tell from the look and feel of the sunset? I've ordered up the paper, but until it arrives - why that six-year period? Did he look at any other six-year periods? What was his r2? Etc.
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Yes.
There is an even deeper reason to suspect the long term usefulness of this market-based, weather prediction claim - it disagrees with the fundamentals of some of the best science to come out of meteorology in decades: chaos theory.
As Edward Lorenz (see link below), the pioneer of the field demonstrated decades ago, short-term weather prediction is possible but due to the climate system's profound sensitivity to small changes, called by specialists 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions', long term forecasting is doomed to failure.
Improvements in our mathematical models and computing power has extended the time of forecasting somewhat but Lorenz's original insights still stand.
I understand that some clever chaps have tried to apply these principles to the market itself - which might produce non-trivial results. If so, that would even further invalidate the OJ-market claim.
You cannot use one system, which possesses a sensitive dependence on initial conditions to predict the behavior of another, even more complex system that has the same characteristic.
Or at least, you can't do this using human minds at our present level of cognition and machine tools at the current level of processing subtlety.
Lorenz info -
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lorenz
DRM
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