The stockmarket’s best crystal ball

Trying to second guess the markets in the short term is a fool's errand. But you can have more success over the long term, says Tim Bennett. Here, he explains how.

Where will the FTSE 100 be at the end of 2013? If you read the papers at all over the next month, you'll see a dozen different answers to this question. And they'll all either be wrong or lucky forecasting the market over such a short period is a mug's game, and most of us know it. But is there any way to predict returns reliably over the longer term?

Can returns be predicted at all?

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.