Guru Grades

Steve Saville: From the Top Down (Last Updated 2/26/10)

As suggested by two readers, we review here the U.S. stock market forecasts of Steve Saville at Safe Haven since March 2003. Steve Saville is the editor of The Speculative Investor. His forecasts "are conceived by integrating the analysis of fundamental, technical, psychological, monetary and political factors..." with "...dual focuses on the stock market (primarily the technology sector) and the gold market." The table below presents overall U.S. stock market forecasting highlights from his commentary and shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 21, 63, 126 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:

• Steve Saville's Safe Haven commentaries address gold, the dollar and other currencies much more frequently and consistently than they address the overall stock market. This review does not cover forecasts for those other assets.
• He sometimes forecasts the performance of U.S. stocks relative to gold. For simplicity and comparability with other stock market forecasters, we evaluate only his forecasts for the nominal (independent) performance of stocks. These forecasts are sporadic.
• His outlook for U.S. stocks has mostly been very negative.
• One complex forecast proved to be about equally right and wrong, so we evaluated it as "0" and graded it both right and wrong.
• Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about his forecasts for overall stock market direction, Steve Saville's accuracy rate is 19%, which is extremely poor. His forecast sample size is very small, as is our confidence in this score.

In summary, Steve Saville's performance in forecasting the behavior of the overall U.S. stock market is extremely poor. Confidence in this conclusion is very low.

His forecasting performance for other assets may be better than his record for the U.S. stock market.

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.