It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of the upward or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful...

Common approaches to testing the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical χ2-test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmermann test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations, but in the...