Predictions for 2025: It's best to take them with a bucket of salt

It's super easy to make forecasts but the truth is that nobody really knows how things will turn out

- DEVINA MEHRA

The year has started and you have all the Nifty (or Nasdaq/S&P 500) forecasts for end 2025 from every stock-market expert, securities house and talking head on TV. Keep them safe to check in December 2025. For now, you should check what these experts told you a year ago! The truth? It's in the 'Objective Ignorance' category, as explained in Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Cass R. Sunstein and Olivier Sibony.

Index predictions are only one example of humans forecasting things which are not just unknown, but cannot be known. Yet, they are made with huge conviction in January and Diwali time. "We maintain unchastened willingness to make bold predictions about the future from little useful information," as Kahneman says.

I understood this phrase only in 2023, but I have never given index projections for the last three decades that I have been in the market because I intuitively understood that it was impossible to predict market moves.