M6 Financial Forecasting Competition announced

M6 Financial Forecasting Competition

The Makridakis Open Forecasting Center has announced the M6 Financial Forecasting Competition, to begin in February 2022. This will be a "live" competition running through February 2023, with a focus on forecasts of stock price (returns) and risk, and on investment decisions based on the forecasts. This forecasting and investing "duathlon" will draw substantial coverage from the forecasting community and from the public and mass media, with a prize pool targeted at $300,000.

As in all M competitions, the M6 is designed as a research endeavor. Its purpose is to empirically investigate an apparent paradox: The efficient market hypothesis posits that share prices reflect all relevant information, so consistently outperforming the market is not feasible. The EMH is supported by considerable evidence that active investment managers do not beat, on average, random stock selections. However, certain investors such as Warren Buffet have achieved long-term market beating returns impossible to justify by mere chance. The M6 is expected to shed new light on the EMH.

Find details on entering the competition and M6 guidelines on the competition website.

M5 Conference (December 6-7)

The M6 follows 2020's M5 and 2018's M4, which showed an increasingly valuable role of machine learning methods to augment and improve upon traditional time series methods. The M5 Conference, currently scheduled for December 6-7 in New York City, will provide a stellar lineup of speakers to review, analyze, and discuss the results and implications of the M5 competition. This includes remarks by M-competition founder Spyros Makridakis, and keynotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb of NYU and Chris Fry of Google.