CFA Society Los Angeles 2017 Finance & Economics Challenge
SUPERFORECASTING IS LIVE
CFA Society Los Angeles is pleased to announce the first-ever online collaborative forecasting network for members and friends of CFALA. In fact, this is the first-ever online financial forecasting competition anywhere in the world using the technology that won the U.S. Intelligence Community's contest: The Good Judgment Open.
Go to www.gjopen.com/cfa now, register, and begin making your predictions. When you register, use the letters CFA or CFALA in your username so that members of the CFALA community can readily identify your affiliation to follow and up-vote your comments (and you can follow and up-vote theirs). Also, check out the CFALA Discussion Forum for further discussion with fellow CFALA members.
Members and non-members alike can sharpen their prediction skills on questions of critical importance, including markets, rates, economic data, industries, and companies. Randomized controlled experiments demonstrated that as little as one hour of training improved forecasting accuracy by about 14% over the course of a year.
Tracking will occur throughout the year, using Good Judgment Inc.'s superior scoring algorithm which was the subject of the New York Times #1 best-selling book Superforecasting. The top 50 participants will be announced at the Superforecasting awards ceremony in February, 2018.
Superforecasting was named an Economist magazine book of the year, was the second most recommended book of 2015 by Bloomberg’s top 50 contributors in finance and economics, and has been recommended by Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal book review, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Michael Mauboussin, and AQR Chief Risk Officer Aaron Brown.
In 2011, the US Intelligence Community created the CIA equivalent to DARPA called IARPA to fund cutting-edge research with the potential to make the intelligence community smarter and more effective. They created a 
forecasting tournament and recruited teams from major universities, selected a half dozen finalists, and posed hundreds of geopolitical questions to them. Superforecasting tells how a few thousand amateur citizen-forecasters, recruited by Wharton professor Phil Tetlock, perhaps the world's leading expert on predicting the future, beat competitors like MIT -- and even the entirety of the U.S. intelligence community, which spends $50 billion per year and has 20,000 analysts -- by being an astonishing 30% more accurate in their predictions than analysts that had access to classified intercepts. This is truly a story of David beating Goliath using the wisdom of the crowd. One of the key conclusions of the competition is that forecasting accuracy can be significantly improved by participating.
