In late October, as the stock market was floundering, brash emails started to appear in my inbox.

With the subject line “Stock Exchange predictions for tomorrow and next trading week,” the messages said they contained forecasts “generated by 7,445 adaptive machine intelligence models…that predict stock movements one day and one week in advance” at an average accuracy of 72.45%.

Human intelligence usually fails to predict where stocks are headed in the short term, so I decided to see whether artificial intelligence is better at it. I used the most basic guidelines I know, from the chapter “How to Talk Back to a Statistic” in Darrell Huff’s classic 1954 book, How to Lie with Statistics.

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