To: John Soileau who wrote (84399 ) 4/14/2002 3:51:14 AM From: E. Charters Respond to of 116798 I forget the thread topic too, but it is supposed to be in the thread title, but that can't be it, as I have never seen any interest in, for instance, software or methods that will predict, display or monitor prices or factors affecting price. Apparently, despite Shannon and the DSP revolution, -- according the the mathematical geniuses here, it - (prediction) - cannot be done. That, and predicting or "monitoring" the price of gold, is b-o-r-i-n-g. So, it (the subject) must be politics, underwear, religion, random news items, foodstuffs, the weather, race, sex, historical anthropology, egos, other posters, persecution, insanity, bad government, or outboard motors. (By inference) Perhaps it could be a combination of all, or any of the above. Related issues such as metal prices, commodities, fiscal policy and other government policy, interest rates, gold mining, and supply and demand should be avoided as the poster might be tbought of as pedantic, or off topic. -Or- worse still, wrong. So that said, do you think that mathematicians who use fourier analysis to predict commodity levels for the government wear underwear? BVD's or Jockey? Or-- Hanes? Of course they cannot predict commodity levels despite the fact that economic texts say so, so they are wrong, or lucky. So what type of underwear should they wear? P.S. -- the Ontario government could not predict growth in the economy accurately until late in the 1970's. They hired some economists from various Ontario universities who enabled them to do so. I am not sure what technique they used, but I know that charts from FP were used. The accuracy of prediction was within 15 to 25% of the total move. That is pretty good considering the politicians did not even know the direction it would go before that. This saved the government million in, for instance, building hiways, because the could predict the money available to build them and their probable usage. Hydro one should do the same thing. EC<:-}