All over the world there are thousands of analysts trying to forecast financial markets based on their predictions for the economy. Unfortunately, most of this is a complete waste of time.

Even if you have perfect foresight of whether growth accelerates or decelerates from one quarter to the next, your portfolio will lose money if you use this as a signal to buy or sell the market in anticipation; and that's true for almost all markets, no matter whether you buy three months or six months ahead of the economic cycle. Yes, that's right, you're significantly better off flipping a coin than listening to economists if you want to make money trading markets through the economic cycles.

Of course, economists are not completely useless. They redeem themselves by having a perfect explanation for the disconnect between financial markets and the national economy — the former no longer reflects the latter. Political leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — who both have explicitly stated that they view the stock market as the ultimate objective arbiter for the success of their policies — should take note. After all, markets don't vote; but the citizens of a national economy do.