Sunday, July 27, 2008

Market Forecasts

Total level of demand for a product, across all brands, expected to result from a particular marketing effort by the competitors in the market. Environmental trends not under the control of the marketers, such as social trends or economic changes, can greatly impact the accuracy of the market forecast.

Consensus forecast-Definition

The forecasts for a given company, taken in aggregate, for all analysts who follow that company.

For a financial instrument whose price follows a Gaussian random walk, or Wiener process, the volatility increases as time increases. Conceptually, this is because there is an increasing probability that the instrument's price will be farther away from the initial price as time increases. However, rather than increase linearly, the volatility increases with the square-root of time as time increases, because some fluctuations are expected to cancel each other out, so the most likely deviation after twice the time will not be twice the distance from zero.