| Q: Where can I find historical annual inflation
rates? |
|
A chart of the
historical annual inflation rates
for the US are provide for your information. |
| Q: Do you post your past performance for the
forecasts? |
|
No. The past performance and the expected error of current forecasts are
given in the standard deviations given with each forecast. For more
explanation and
background information see "forecasting accuracy"
|
| Q: Are
you crazy? |
|
Yes. Our goal is not to publish the most politically correct forecasts
our
goal is to produce the most objective forecasts. And
sometimes
were wrong. But if you
think something is amiss
please don't hesitate to contact us.
|
| Q: Why do the forecasts change? |
|
There are three reasons they change. 1) In the quest for continuous
improvement
the neural network models are reformulated or trained in subtly different
ways. 2) Due to the complexity of the economies and markets
all possible
behaviors have not been witnessed in the past. Thus when the markets demonstrate a
new behavior
the neural networks learn from this and take any changes in economic
relationships into account
and 3) Sometimes the neural networks get stuck-they lock in on
a specific number. While this lock-in is rare for forecasts up to 7 to 8 months
it
is a big problem for forecasts at 18 months. And since FFC is moving towards more
and more automated network training
we will implement more guards against
detecting networks locking-in (if all the numbers from month to month
show little or no variation
this may be the case).
If you subscribe to the
long range forecasts
you may see a disparity between the values forecasted
for month 6 and month 7. The long range forecasted values use a
slightly different data set that reaches much further back in history
thus there may be a small discontinuity between the short range (1 to
6 months) and the long range (7 to 18 months).
|
| Q: Where can I find the 30 stocks of the Dow
Jones Industrial Average
500 Stocks of the S&P 500 or 2000 stocks of the Russell
2000? |
|
Glad you asked. We have
links to each of these lists in our information section. |