The most obvious ability that stock or commodity buyers and sellers wish for is foresight. If there was a method or technique that we could use to predict what tomorrow will bring in the market, all our problems would be solved. There are people everywhere that believe one prediction method or another has some validity in forecasting market behavior. I will not claim to know a method that is better than everyone else's nor claim that our method is better than all others.
Forecasting based on past price data can be very enlightening or can be disappointing.
There is always enough history to draw some conclusion about probable future stock price activity. The best of forecasts will have some degree of uncertainty. Maximum Entropy Method forecasts, with our computer implementation, are as good as can be expected, based soley on past price information. The amount of data used to forecast must be chosen with some care and common sense. 5 year subscription to Working Money.