Full record
HitmarketsUS equity markets perform better within two to three months of 2016-02-04; no US recession results from the early-2016 financial turmoil.
A scored prediction by Tom Lee, made on .
Scored prediction
Hitmarkets“The market have been terrible. But that doesn't mean this is how markets are going to behave two [or] three months from now. ... There are lots of reasons to expect markets to start to perform better.”
US equity markets perform better within two to three months of 2016-02-04; no US recession results from the early-2016 financial turmoil.
- Made on
- 2016-02-04
- Outcome
- Hit
- Importance
- 4 / 5
- Effect on score
- +3.68
What counted as right
- Status
- resolved
- Settled on
- 2016-05-04
The S&P 500's 2016-05-04 close is above its 2016-02-04 close.
Both legs are cleanly determined and no conflicting evidence was found. Leg (a) resolves on the deadline date itself (2016-05-04); leg (b) was already determinate in substance by then but is confirmed permanently by the NBER's dating, which has never placed a peak in 2016. Two caveats to carry forward. First, the record's own criterion states that leg (b) rests on CNBC's paraphrase rather than Lee's quoted words, so the no-recession leg may be a reporter's framing rather than the pundit's verbatim claim — that provenance question belongs to the verify stage, not to outcome evidence, and I have not attempted to re-source the underlying quote here. Second, the S&P 500 closes are from Yahoo Finance's historical price API rather than an exchange or S&P DJI feed, because FRED blocks automated fetching from this environment; the values are standard, widely reproduced index closes (1,915.45 and 2,051.12) and the internal consistency of the surrounding week supports them, but a primary S&P DJI or exchange citation would be preferable if one becomes reachable.
Sources
Tom Lee: No recession, it just feels like it
CNBC ·
Evidence of what happened
LEG (a), equities — S&P 500 daily closes. 2016-02-04 close: 1,915.45. 2016-05-04 close: 2,051.12. The 2016-05-04 close is 7.08% above the 2016-02-04 close, so the index was higher on the deadline date. Surrounding closes confirm the dates are correctly identified and the result is not a one-day artefact: 2016-02-02 1,903.03, 2016-02-03 1,912.53, 2016-02-05 1,880.05; 2016-05-02 2,081.43, 2016-05-03 2,063.37, 2016-05-05 2,050.63, 2016-05-06 2,057.14. Every trading day in the 2016-05-02 to 2016-05-06 window closed above the 2016-02-04 level, so the leg holds under any reasonable nearby-date convention.
LEG (b), recession — NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, official US business cycle expansions and contractions table. The peak dates from 2000 onward are March 2001, December 2007 and February 2020. There is NO peak dated in 2016; the expansion that began in June 2009 ran 128 months until February 2020, the longest in the NBER's records back to 1854. The NBER therefore dates no US recession arising from the early-2016 turmoil.
Corrections
- Quote wording: Match the source: CNBC bracketed the inserted '[or]' and separated the fragments with 'he said'; preserve the outlet's editorial marking rather than laundering it into one clean sentence.
- What counted as right: Criterion must test only the direct-quote leg; drop the paraphrase-derived recession leg. Outcome unchanged (resolves TRUE).
Effect on the score
+3.68- How sure they sounded
- 80%
- Outcome
- Hit
- Importance
- 4 / 5
This page shows the scored prediction as published; the site doesn't recompute or adjust the score.
Where this came from
US equity markets perform better within two to three months…- Methodology version
- v1.0.0
- Last computed
- August 5, 2026
- Made on
- 2016-02-04
How this profile was built
Scored by independent judges
Predictions gathered and sourced
Independently verified against sources