While that's true, it overlooks the fact that analysts' earnings forecasts, and investment strategists' predictions of market returns, turn out to be wrong every year.

To me, the lesson of 2020 isn't that a giant, unpredictable "black swan" can wreak havoc with the best forecasts. Instead, the lesson is that whatever seems most obvious is least likely to happen.

Imagine that it's Jan. 1, 2020, and you have a magic crystal ball. It tells you that coronavirus will spread like wildfire, killing nearly 2 million people worldwide and putting the global economy into an unprecedented coma for months.

Now imagine that you are the only person alive who knows that and you get to make one trade on the basis of that information.

What would you do?

I mean, with hindsight, you can pretend you would have said: "Well, that will make stocks go up!"

You can try kidding yourself, but you can't kid me. We both know you would have shorted, or bet against, stocks. Who wouldn't have?

You might have bought a triple-inverse ETF, like ProShares UltraPro Short S&P500. That fund seeks to triple the opposite of the daily return of the index. For every 1% the index loses, the fund aims to gain 3%. It went up 107% between February and March.

For the full year, that fund lost 70%.

In most of daily life, things that seem obvious tend to be true and to stay true. In the financial markets, things that seem obvious often turn out not to happen at all. When everyone believes in the obvious, market prices change to reflect that: The consensus becomes expensive, and the unpopular and unexpected becomes cheap. So the return on "obvious" tends to be abysmal.

No wonder we are so blind when we face the future. Whatever feels most likely to happen often doesn't, precisely because it does feel so likely. Whatever feels least likely to happen may well occur, because no one takes it seriously.

I once wrote that "the only incontrovertible evidence that the past offers about the financial markets is that they will surprise us in the future. The corollary to this historical law is that the future will most brutally surprise those who are the most certain they understand it."

Don't move into 2021 expecting it to be like 2020. Whatever this year holds, it's unlikely to look like last year.

In case you missed it over the holidays, my latest "Back in Business" column, "How Capitalism Saved Christmas," is here.

Be well and invest well,

Jason

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Here are some of the best things I found over the past week outside The Wall Street Journal:

• Individual investors own half of all municipal bonds, analyst Natalie Cohen finds
• Pension funds and other giant investors may misunderstand how private-equity funds calculate returns, a research paper suggests
• The "hidden half" — noise, chance, luck — is the biggest factor in just about everything, says researcher Michael Blastland
• To pay the costs of the coronavirus crisis, history suggests a windfall-profits tax on winning companies, says historian Janette Rutherford
• A psychology experiment proves what parents already know: Children as young as age 5 understand how to trade items of varying value
• Global warming could be a boon for Russia, thawing Siberia into productive farmland, says ProPublica
• Science writer Maria Konnikova surveys the latest thinking on how to make New Year's resolutions stick

Here are some of the best things I found recently in The Wall Street Journal:

• Fidelity Investments is trying to figure out how to turn day traders into long-term investors, reports Justin Baer
• Dave Benoit tells the gripping story of how JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon almost died just as coronavirus nearly killed the global economy
• To make big improvements in your retirement wealth down the road, take baby steps today, advises Anne Tergesen
• Telis Demos goes inside the securitization machine to explain how mortgages get transformed into tradable securities
• China's immense experiment in building more housing than any other nation in history is looking shaky, argues Mike Bird
• Global startup Oyo Hotels & Homes was so hot, it expanded far too fast for its own good, report Newley Purnell and Phred Dvorak
• In making New Year's resolutions, don't hesitate to be ambitious, says contributor Tom Vanderbilt

Have a question you'd like me to answer? Want to weigh in on what you just read? Got a tip on something that I or my colleagues should investigate? Itching to tell me I'm wrong about something? Just reply to this email and I'll see your note.

The mailbag tends to be empty after the holidays, so I'll prompt you with a question, inspired by how often horseshoes and other symbols of luck used to be featured on New Year's cards: How important has luck been to your investing success? Please share some thoughts, and please remember to include your name and address.

The very idea that a forecaster can spin a bunch of outcomes whose probabilities add up to 100% is a kind of hubris. Risk means that more things can happen than will happen, which in turn means that the scenarios we spin will never add up to 100% of the future possibilities except as a matter of luck. Like it or not, the unimaginable outcomes are the ones that make the biggest spread between expected asset returns and the actual result.

— Peter L. Bernstein