How far into the future can we really predict? - page 4

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Victor Paul Hamilton #:
It  is not about the retail trader competing with quants ,It is  by the time the charts they see appear the edge is not there..
    As a retail trader you can't forecast Jack and the tester is trash ,A silly little toy for little boys to waste away the hours  testing , testing , testing instead of growing a pair and trading for real . 

Forum on trading, automated trading systems and testing trading strategies

How far into the future can we really predict?

Ryan L Johnson, 2026.07.18 22:08

Unlike the trader who hangs her/his hat on collected and analyzed statistics, a trader who relies on luck has absolutely nothing to hang her/his hat on. If you're unable to devise and empirically prove a profitable strategy, that is quite common. That does not, however, mean that everyone else in the Forum cannot make it happen.

 
Ryan L Johnson #:

Collected and analyzed stats can't predict the future , If they did we'd all be rich . How many people have got the stats together and ran the numbers in this game 🤣 .Well last time this happened in the USD/JPY haha. 

Honestly too many people on here fooling themselves and  writing a narrative that doesn't exist ,that  is all buying Into the game they want you to play. 

When you see a bandwagon it is too late and that's what retail charts are a bandwagon heading for  them hills  where the big gold was found last week  and your brokers and people selling you EA's are getting rich selling you picks and shovels . Retail trading is a mugs game and the only way to prosper if you are foolish enough to partake is to treat it with the contempt it deserves . 
 
Victor Paul Hamilton #:
[M]any people on here fooling themselves and  writing a narrative that doesn't exist ,that  is all buying Into the game they want you to play.
From the Casino Theory of financial markets... to the Conspiracy Theory of financial markets. Got it.
Victor Paul Hamilton #:
Retail trading is a mugs game and the only way to prosper if you are foolish enough to partake is to treat it with the contempt it deserves .

I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way. I can only imagine the reason. I wish you better success in your Individual Savings Account.

 

I think the key distinction is between predicting a direction and predicting an exact price at an exact time. In my experience, the former is sometimes possible when conditions are favorable, but the latter is much harder to do consistently.

Markets are influenced by countless variables, many of which change unexpectedly. That's why I tend to think in probabilities rather than certainties. If I have a setup that's worked over hundreds of trades, I'm not expecting it to be "right" every time I'm expecting it to have a statistical edge over the long run.

As for forecasting several days ahead, I think it's possible to identify scenarios that have a higher probability of playing out, especially in strong trends or around well-defined market structures. But my confidence decreases the further I look ahead because new information can change the market's behavior.

So I'd say my goal isn't to predict the future with certainty it's to identify situations where the odds appear to be in my favor and manage risk accordingly.

I'm curious whether anyone here has actually gathered long-term data showing consistent multi-day forecasting accuracy, rather than relying on individual examples. I'd be interested to see how those results hold up over a large sample size.

 
cris_mos #:
I'm curious whether anyone here has actually gathered long-term data showing consistent multi-day forecasting accuracy, rather than relying on individual examples. I'd be interested to see how those results hold up over a large sample size.

Even though I don't hold trades long-term, I really wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see consistent multi-day forecasting accuracy somewhere. As positional professional FX traders tend to trade the W1 timeframe, and a 7 day week contains 5 trading days, consistently holding trades through the formation of single bars would inherently constitute multi-day forecasting. That is what I was getting at previously:

Forum on trading, automated trading systems and testing trading strategies

How far into the future can we really predict?

Ryan L Johnson, 2026.07.17 17:10

Think about it this way...

If you use a weekly chart, several weeks are merely the next several bars.

Note that the OP simply didn't want to think about it that way.

So far, this thread is mostly theoretical─not very actionable.

 
Boris Korvatskii:

Hello everyone,

I would like to ask what I believe is a very interesting question about the predictability of the future in financial markets.

As far as I know, there is still no definitive scientific consensus on whether the market is fundamentally a probabilistic system—where probability-based forecasting is the most appropriate approach, much like weather forecasting—or whether there exist relatively stable market structures that persist long enough to allow reliable prediction of specific future price levels.

Without going deeply into the mathematics, I would like to ask a practical question:

How far ahead has anyone here been able to forecast market behavior with consistent confidence?

One important clarification.

A pip is simply a unit of price movement. However, the number of pips that can realistically be expected is naturally limited by how prices actually move. In other words, expecting a market to move hundreds of pips within a few minutes is, in most cases, an extreme event rather than the norm.

Therefore, if someone aims to capture large moves using only one or two positions, the forecast must often extend over many hours, days, or even weeks.

So my main question is:

Does this actually work?

Has anyone here been able to make consistently successful forecasts several days ahead from a given moment (t_0)?

Personally, I suspect that predicting the distant future with certainty is impossible simply because of the nature of reality itself.

In other words, the future is probably emergent rather than deterministically computable over long time horizons.

At the same time, this does not rule out the existence of local stable structures, where the probability distribution of future outcomes becomes significantly biased toward certain scenarios for a limited period of time.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

that's certainly a nice point to think on i once thought of it the other way as we all know that we can't really predict the future with the 100% certainty but what we can do is have probability percentage of an event to take place so i thought what if we analyze the past and look at the related events that moved the market out of which we can get some amount of certainty that the market will move on a news or an event of such nature in either direction but let's just be honest this will only help you hedge but only if we could integrate an AI in this which could take decisions in seconds  and can also analyze the market better i suppose then we can utilize a high impact news event better and with a certainty to make profit but as we are retail traders we are already behind cause of the latency 
 
Ryan L Johnson #:
From the Casino Theory of financial markets... to the Conspiracy Theory of financial markets. Got it.

I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way. I can only imagine the reason. I wish you better success in your Individual Savings Account.

Your imagination is way off point in this instance ,I guarantee it ! .I think you are a bit deluded to be honest and don't want to face some truths that it is all down to luck in the end . 

Some people need to feel they are in control or their little World would fall apart . I embrace chaos and deal with it as is , that is where skill is ,Do you forecast sunny days or do you wear a vest but stick a jacket and an umbrella in a backpack . 

You truly believe the financial markets are just and true nevermind the retail space that is basically a collection of mugs to top up the big boys play money. 
All the designs of the retail space mimic gambling sites , the apps the little flashy lights , the bonus incentives , the open trade in your pocket so you can check your screen every 2 minutes , the more you check the more you panic and make rash choices .

Good luck in your rose tinted glasses but you won't need forecasting in your new scalping/gambling venture 🤣. Goodbye not in the Jason Smith sense but Adieu. 
 
514490137 #:
that's certainly a nice point to think on i once thought of it the other way as we all know that we can't really predict the future with the 100% certainty but what we can do is have probability percentage of an event to take place so i thought what if we analyze the past and look at the related events that moved the market out of which we can get some amount of certainty that the market will move on a news or an event of such nature in either direction but let's just be honest this will only help you hedge but only if we could integrate an AI in this which could take decisions in seconds  and can also analyze the market better i suppose then we can utilize a high impact news event better and with a certainty to make profit but as we are retail traders we are already behind cause of the latency 
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