Exactly. And even if you have one million people making only a single prediction. Some people are going to be right. Especially because a downturn is like a 1 in 20 chance if you go by years. So out of a million people having one guess at the next downturn, about 200.000 will be right and can brag about it, without having any higher understanding about what happened (even if they will staunchly believe they understood something, because they were right).
What I observe though, is not large numbers of people making random guesses and exponentially fewer being validated through random events.
The people who become notable are those who predicted an economic crisis, for decades before circa 2008, and once they got notoriety for that, have continued to predict doom for the subsequent decade. Eventually they either die or are right again.
