Guru Grades
Igor Greenwald: Still Ignoring Igor (Last Updated 1/20/07)
We evaluate here the advice offered in the "Trendspotting" column in SmartMoney.com by Igor Greenwald since October 2002 (the earliest available). Igor Greenwald was a regular writer and columnist for SmartMoney.com. The chart below extracts highlights from his commentary and shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 5, 21, 63 and 254 trading days after the publication date for each item. Red plus (minus) signs to the right of specific items indicate those that the market has subsequently proven right (wrong). We conclude that:
- Igor Greenwald has been generally pessimistic about the U.S. economy, even when he chooses to be in the market. He has been generally negative on U.S. equities, preferring foreign equities when invested.
- Mr. Greenwald cites wide-ranging sources of data and opinion; we cannot deduce his signal priorities.
- Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about the accuracy of his recommendations, Igor Greenwald's bottom-line conclusions were right 41% of the time, below average. His forecast sample size is modest, as is our confidence in this conclusion.
- Igor Greenwald apparently stopped spotting trends as of January 2006. We retain this record as part of an overall review of the timing ability of stock market experts.
In summary, Igor Greenwald's market timing intuition is below average. Confidence in this conclusion is modest.
See Guru Grades for a snapshot of the accuracy of various experts in predicting the direction of the U.S. stock market, including links to evaluations of the commentaries of other individual market pundits and gurus.
