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Houshalter comments on Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's not really true. You need to make correct predictions many times on many different things to get significant returns from your initial seed investment. There are also a lot of details like finding someone to take your short, and getting it at just the right time before the market crashes.
There also is such a methodology to make really good predictions. Train a bunch of people through practice to be good at forecasting the future and learn from their mistakes, and take the top performers from that group: http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest-whos-good-forecasts
They even beat CIA analysts: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent
There is also this guy. I remember him from the book Automate This, that he was supposedly able to predict exactly how Iran would act back when they were developing nuclear weapons. His method, as best I understand it, is to simply list everyone involved that has influence, and predict they will do exactly what benefits them individually the most.
That is not true and entirely depends on what your investment is. For example, in late 2012 in a move that was heavily telegraphed yen dropped from about 80 yen/dollar to about 100 yen/dollar. That's a 20% return over a few months and given that FX trades are heavily leveraged (typically at 50:1 or so) you could have made multiples of your initial investment.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the study that was performed, but from the articles it seems that this study has only been going on for 3 years now? In which case, any one sitting at the top of the heap is still pretty likely to have gotten there largely through luck. With a large sample size it's entirely possible for at least a couple of people to 'beat the odds' and get a number of questions correct again and again, without necessarily being any better than those who did poorly.
Even with a fairly significant number of questions being asked and rated, it does not appear to be a long enough study to start suggesting those at the top have better skills as opposed to better luck.
They took the best of one year, and the next year everyone in that group still did very good. They didn't regress to the mean. And the reported effect size seems very large.
I've read half of his book. He details (sorta) his algorithm (which is a specific algorithm, he doesn't do that by his own intuition).