At the end of 2018 I made four predictions for 2019 and now that we’re nearing the end of the year it’s time to see how accurate they were. It’s a valuable exercise to review them - both to hold myself accountable but also to get a glimpse of how I thought about the world a year ago. It’s also a way to understand the biases I fall into and use that information to hopefully improve my predictions for 2020.

So how’d I do?

• The overall economy takes a hit. I was clearly wrong here and the market, as measured by the S&P 500 grew 25%. My initial thinking was that there would be some event that in the current political climate would lead to a downturn but this year turned out to be exceptionally strong.
• Facebook privacy concerns are overblown. This turned out to be true and Facebook has performed exceptionally well in the market being up 45% year to date. There’s been a ton of harsh press but it hasn’t really impeded Facebook’s ability to grow and generate revenue.
• Amazon continues to dominate. Similar story with Amazon. It hasn’t grown as significantly as Facebook but is up 14% year to date. I am and have been more optimistic around Amazon’s growth prospects than Facebook’s so this was a bit of a surprise. Every company has a ceiling and I suspect Facebook will be hitting theirs ahead of Amazon.
• China vs US becomes a bigger deal. This is tough to say. There’s clearly a lot of back and forth between the two countries around tariffs that’s still playing out but I expected worse and drove my prediction for the hit to the economy.

Overall I’d say I got at least two correct, one partially right, and one way off target. I’m still coming up with predictions for 2020 so we’ll see how accurate those are a year from now.