

Why confident predictions about markets usually get the most important things wrong
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The other day, I came across an exchange on X where an American trader posted a confident thesis: AI would compress revenues of Indian IT companies like TCS and Infosys. Reasonable concern. Many analysts have raised it.
But then he took the argument several steps further.If IT revenues fall, he reasoned, India's current account deficit would widen by that amount. If the deficit widened, the rupee would weaken. Therefore, the real trade was to short the Indian rupee.
It sounded like a neat chain of logic.The problem was, as several people pointed out, the chain doesn't work that way. A weaker rupee would make Indian exports cheaper and more competitive, which would tend to reduce the deficit, not widen it endlessly. The currency and the current account don't move in a straight line.
They move in a loop, each influencing the other, as the system constantly adjusts and corrects itself.I found this amusing but also instructive, because Indian retail investors make precisely the same mistake all the time. It's the habit of taking a single fact or trend and extrapolating it forward in a neat, unbroken trajectory—as if nothing else in the system will respond or adjust along the way. As if there will be no second- or third-order effects.You see this everywhere.A company reports two weak quarters, and investors conclude it's in permanent decline—ignoring that management might cut costs, pivot strategy, or benefit from a competitor's stumble.
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