Happy New Year! It's prediction time.

Amazon will buy Dollar General this year.  eBay will move 50% of its marketing spend from direct response to brand building. And Charmin’s RollBot, launched at CES, will deliver toilet paper to millions of asses stranded without even one ply to spare.

Just kidding. I don't know. And neither do the pundits.

They are, sadly, about as good as a coin toss. For example, Mad Money star Jim Cramer is right about 47% of the time, and in the past decade the S&P beat his charitable trust by about 30%.

How hard is predicting things in business?

• 60% of new restaurants close in 3 years

• 85% of new CPG products fail

• 90% of TV pilots don’t get ordered

These are smart people making big bets. Most people get lucky and make a couple good predictions, but then luck runs out.

But not the Superforecasters at Good Judgment. Their methods (which we can all learn from) help them get it right over 60% of the time. Not perfect, but a HUGE improvement over a coin toss.

Predictions will never be 100% right because the human sphere is inherently complex, chaotic, and unpredictable.  But there is a method to tame the madness. At least a little bit.