Sneak Peek: How FutureFirst™ Superforecast Alerts Keep You Ahead

Subscribers to FutureFirst™, Good Judgment’s exclusive forecasting and monitoring service, enjoy 24/7 access to expert-driven insights on key economic, geopolitical, and market-moving questions. Superforecast Alerts, included with the service, provide timely updates when:

A high-profile question is added to the platform.
The aggregate forecast shifts significantly, signaling a meaningful change in Superforecasters’ expectations.

Related questions are grouped into clusters to offer broader analytical context. See our discussion on the relevance-rigor trade-off for more details.

These alerts empower decision-makers with actionable intelligence provided by Good Judgment’s elite Superforecasters—a diverse global team with a proven track record of accuracy. To illustrate the value of these alerts, here’s an example available to FutureFirst subscribers on 18 January 2025. This alert focused on expected interest rate decisions from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE).

Superforecasting Central Banks

What will be the European Central Bank’s (ECB) most recently announced “Deposit facility” interest rate as of January 30, 2025?

Date	Less than 2.50%	At least 2.50%, but less than 2.75%	At least 2.75%, but less than 3.00%	At least 3.00%, but less than 3.25%	3.25% or higher
18 Jan 2025	0%	0%	94%	6%	0%

What will be the Bank of England’s Bank Rate at the close of business on February 6, 2025?

Date	Less than 4.25%	At least 4.25%, but less than 4.50%	At least 4.50%, but less than 4.75%	At least 4.75%, but less than 5.00%	5.00% or more
18 Jan 2025	0%	0%	74%	26%	0%

18 Jan 2025 14:57 ET – To kick off 2025, Superforecasters anticipate the following interest rate decisions. They forecast a 94% probability that the European Central Bank will lower its “Deposit facility” interest rate on 30 January 2025. They expect it to fall within a range of 2.75% to less than 3.00%, with only a minimal chance that the rate will remain the same. Economists in a Reuters survey unanimously expect a 25-basis-point reduction, reflecting the ECB’s ongoing easing cycle amid Europe’s sluggish economic growth and moderately increasing inflation rates, such as a recent 2.4% increase in the eurozone. Despite a gradual rise in inflation, policymakers aim to meet a 2% goal by mid-2025, facing pressures from rising services prices and low unemployment. Yet, concerns about energy costs and inflationary pressures in certain eurozone areas could challenge further rate cuts.

Looking ahead to the Bank of England’s meeting on 6 February 2025, Superforecasters see a 74% probability that the Bank Rate will decrease to at least 4.50% but less than 4.75%, with a 26% probability for it to stay the same at a range of at least 4.75% but less than 5.00%. A recent dip in UK inflation to 2.5% has strengthened expectations for a rate cut, as economists see evidence of the restrictive monetary policy’s effectiveness in easing inflation pressures. However, ongoing concerns about inflationary pressures driven by the government’s tax measures and rising gilt yields may complicate the central bank’s easing strategies. Despite these uncertainties, most surveyed economists anticipate a quarter-point cut in the upcoming meeting.

Superforecaster Quotes

(European Central Bank): “The ECB is two weeks away from what’s widely expected to be the fifth rate cut of this easing cycle. Despite inflation ticking higher last month, policymakers are confident of meeting their 2% goal in 2025 and remain concerned about Europe’s sluggish economy.”
(European Central Bank): “The European Central Bank can ease policy further this year but must find a middle ground that neither induces a recession nor causes an undue delay in curbing inflation, ECB chief economist Philip Lane told an Austrian newspaper.”
(European Central Bank): “If interest rates fall too quickly, it will be difficult to bring services inflation under control…But we also don’t want rates to remain too high for too long, because that would weaken the inflation momentum in such a way that the disinflation process would not stop at 2% but inflation could materially fall below target.”
(Bank of England): “Inflation numbers better than expected, making another cut more likely.”
(Bank of England): “The deceleration in inflation, which still remains above the BoE 2% target, is likely to be taken by MPC members as a sign that the restrictive monetary policy stance is helping to bring inflation closer to the target. As such, it will give MPC members enough evidence to cut rates by 25bps at their next meeting in February.”
(Bank of England): “Despite unpredictability around the future policies of US President Elect Donald Trump and their inflationary impact, the economy’s weak momentum might confirm a scenario in which the Bank of England proceeds with faster interest rate cuts in 2025.”

Superforecaster Sources

Why FutureFirst?

Superforecast Alerts like this give our clients a decisive advantage by providing early warnings and Superforecasters’ interpretations of emerging trends. Whether you’re monitoring central bank decisions, geopolitical events, or financial markets, FutureFirst keeps you informed—so you can make smarter, more confident decisions ahead of the curve.

📩 Want to receive exclusive alerts like this? Subscribe to FutureFirst today.

Good Judgment Inc: A Year in Review

From our headquarters in Manhattan to Canada to Brazil and points in between, the Good Judgment team had a productive and exciting year in 2021. Here are some of the key developments and projects we worked on in the past year.

FutureFirst™ Launched

One of the biggest additions to Good Judgment’s spectrum of services in 2021 was the launch of FutureFirst. FutureFirst is a client-driven subscription platform that gives our user community unlimited access to all Good Judgment’s subscription Superforecasts.

In many ways, FutureFirst is a consolidation of our scientific experiments and several years of successful client engagements. We designed FutureFirst to

- offer clients one-click access to the collective wisdom of our international team of Superforecasters—to their predictions, rationales, and sources;
- enable easy monitoring of the Superforecasters’ predictions on a wide range of topics (economy and finance, geopolitics, environment, technology, health, and more); and
- allow clients to nominate and upvote new questions that matter to their organization so that the topics are crowd-sourced from the community of clients directly.

A sample of books that mention Superforecasters

With the addition of the Class of 2022 Superforecasters, Good Judgment now works with more than 180 professional Superforecasters. They reside on every continent except Antarctica and have been identified through a rigorous process to join the world’s most accurate forecasters.

There are currently some 80 active forecasts on FutureFirst, with new questions being added nearly every week. Taken together, the forecasts on the platform paint the big picture of global risk with accuracy not found anywhere else.

Improving Ways of Eliciting and Aggregating Forecasts

At the same time, we continue to crowdsource other ideas to enhance the value of our service for clients. In response to user feedback and innovations by our data science team, we:

- now offer “continuous forecasts” so that clients can have a target forecast number as well as probabilities distributed across ranges;
- provide “rolling forecasts” on a custom basis with predictions that automatically advance each day so that the time horizon is fixed—for instance, the probability of a recession in the next 12 months;
- will be launching API access shortly for clients to have a data feed directly into their models.

Superforecasters in the Media

Superforecasters predict Jerome Powell’s reappointment

From questions about the Tokyo Olympics to the renomination of Jerome Powell to our early forecasts about Covid-19 that were closed and scored in the past year, the year 2021 offered many examples of Good Judgment’s Superforecasters providing early and accurate insights. The European Central Bank and financial firms such as Goldman Sachs and T. Rowe Price all referenced our forecasts in their work. The year also brought both new and returning collaborations with some of the world’s leading media organizations and authors.

- We worked with The Economist on their “What If” and “The World Ahead 2022” annual publications.
- The Financial Times featured our forecast on Covid-19 vaccinations on their front page and on their Covid-19 data page.
- Sky News launched an exciting current affairs challenge for the UK and beyond on our public platform GJ Open.
- Best-selling authors Tim Harford and Adam Grant also ran popular forecasting challenges.
- Adam Grant’s Think Again and Daniel Kahneman’s Noise (with coauthors Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein) published in 2021 discuss Superforecasters’ outstanding track record.
- Magazines such as Luckbox and Entrepreneur published major articles about Good Judgment and the Superforecasters.

Training Better Forecasters

Our workshops continued to attract astute business and government participants who received the best training on boosting in-house forecasting accuracy. Of all the organizations that had a workshop in 2020, more than 90% came back for more in 2021. And they were joined by many more organizations in the public and private sectors throughout the year. Many of these firms now regularly send their interns and new hires through our workshops. Capstone LLC, a global policy analysis firm with headquarters in Washington, DC, London, and Sydney, went a step further: They made our workshops the cornerstone of multi-day mandatory training sessions for all their analysts.

“This led to the adoption of [S]uperforecasting techniques across all of our research and a more rigorous measuring of all our predictions,” Capstone CEO David Barrosse wrote on the company’s blog. “Ultimately the process means better predictions, and more value for clients.”

As many in our company are themselves Superforecasters, we start any forecast about Good Judgment in 2022 by first looking back. The science of Superforecasting has shown that establishing a base rate leads to making more accurate predictions. If the developments in 2021 are a valid indication, next year will bring more exciting projects, fruitful collaborations, and effective ways to bring valuable early insight to our clients.