In 1982, the Journal of Forecasting published the results of a forecasting competition organized by Spyros Makridakis (Makridakis et al., 1982). In this, the ex ante forecast errors of 21 methods were compared for forecasts of a variety of economic time series, generally using 1001 time series....

The M3-Competition continues to improve the design of forecasting competitions: It examines more series than any previous competition, improves error analyses and includes commercial forecasting programs as competitors. To judge where to go from here, I step back to look at the M-Competitions as...