Great post, Lauren. I read it on my laptop while having a braai with both biltong and a sundowner (not "klippies and coke" though) at Pringle Bay, looking across False Bay to Table Mountain.

Regarding seer-sucker, to add to how bad earnings forecasts are, I have collected 17 years of quarterly South African "expert" inflation forecasts, and I have access to 34 years of quarterly USA inflation forecasts. Both sets of forecasts have proven almost comically hopeless. No amount of failure seems to dent the forecasters' continued enthusiasm or to persuade them to take themselves a little less seriously. The pernicious part though is that these forecasters tend to compare outcomes to the forecasts they made just days before the data release; not to those they made say a year ago, when they might have been useful to investors.