Pushpendra Singh Why I stopped giving price predictions
They get views. They are also the least honest thing I could put in front of you, and I want to explain why.
Price predictions work. A video with a number in the title outperforms one without, every time. I know this, because I have the numbers.
I stopped making them anyway, and I think the reason matters more than the decision.
They are not information
A prediction sounds like knowledge. It is a guess with confidence attached.
Nobody knows where the price will be in six months. Not me, not the person with a chart full of lines, not the fund manager on television. The difference between us is not accuracy, it is how comfortably we say it.
When I put a number in front of you, I am not telling you something true. I am telling you something that feels true, which is worse, because it is harder to argue with.
They replace your thinking with mine
This is the part that actually bothered me.
If you buy something because I said a number, you have no way to decide anything afterwards. It drops 40%, and what do you do? You cannot evaluate it, because the reasoning was never yours. You either message me, or you panic.
I have had both. Neither is a position I want to be in, and neither is a position that helps you.
Being right is worse than being wrong
A wrong prediction gets forgotten. A right one is the dangerous one.
Call it correctly once and people stop checking your reasoning entirely. They start treating the next call as reliable, which it is not, because the first one was luck dressed as skill.
The most damaging thing I could do to someone is be right in public at the wrong moment.
What I do instead
I talk about the questions rather than the answers. What I check before buying. How I decide size. What would make me sell. What the tax does to a strategy in India.
These travel. You can apply them to something I have never heard of, in a market I am not watching, in a year when I am not around.
A price target does none of that. It is useful for exactly one asset, for exactly as long as it takes to be wrong.
What to do when you see one
Ask what happens to that person if it does not come true. Usually the answer is nothing.
They keep the views either way. You keep the position.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this content exists, and it is why I would rather have fewer viewers and be worth listening to.