I would just like to add that one shouldn’t look at this and miss the forest for the trees here. I would say that it actually is pretty easy to predict general and large scale trends on the marketplace. Actually, very easy with he availability of information we have today. What is difficult, if not impossible, is timing the market - i.e. not only predicting what will happen but also when ,which one would need to profit from it.
For example, Any reasonable person looking at the US housing market in 2004-5 would have realized that prices were spiraling up towards unsustainable levels, and were destined to fall sharply back to fundamentals, but would it have happened in 2005? 06? 07, as it ultimately did? I don’t think any of us could have answered that. That’s why they call it timing the market. What I’m trying to get at is when it comes to things like this, you don’t necessarily need to be able to TIME the market, but only to recognize trends and act in a prudent manner. The person who actually bought the market in 1929 or houses in 2007 would have to have been a complete fool, and in the minority.