For reasons unknown this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald popped into my inbox the other day. I haven’t had much of a look at it but it looks like the usual journalistic misunderstanding of how the world works and there are only two points worth making. Firstly, for every option buyer in the world who thinks oil is going to $100 a barrel there is an option writer who thinks it is not. There is a wonderful symmetry to derivative markets that is lost on journalists probably, because they require more than a degree in media studies to understand. Secondly, on the idea of experts predicting stuff I offer the following chart which I generated sometime ago regarding various expert predictions on where oil was going.
you are assuming that the journalist gets rewarded for the accuracy of their article. I would suggest that number of readers is the real determinant of success and that the link between number of readers and accuracy is tenuous at best.
It is a slippery slope.