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Teams in the National Football League (NFL) spend a lot of money, resources, and time in analyzing who they should draft each year. Players are interviewed, run through a battery of tests, and watched for countless hours on film. And yet, after all this very thorough analysis, NFL teams still end up drafting a lot of players in early rounds who don’t pan out as expected, while some players who are picked in the later rounds of the draft or are not even drafted, turn out to be stars. So, too, are oil prices difficult to forecast.

I think it's absurd that this is text from an actual federal document. Absurd.

NFL prospects aren't difficult to forecast. This retard at the DOE must not realize that guys like Pioli/Belichick and Cowher routinely make excellent choices at forecasting the apparently "unforecastable." The key, then, to whatever extent this analogy has any application to oil futures forecasting, is to find people who can properly make these forecasts. And choosing quality players late in the draft doesn't at all mean that the drafter believed that player wasn't good enough to be drafted previously. The rounds that players are drafted by crafty drafters are based on which round they think the player will be drafted and to draft him just before that round-- so that his price tag is as cheap as possible and so you can acquire less risky players earlier.

You could have drafted a fantasy baseball team in 2001 and drafted Albert Pujols in the 1st round. At the end of the season, everyone would agree Pujols produced like a 1st rounder. Or, you could have drafted a fantasy baseball team and drafted A-Rod in the 1st and Pujols in the last round. The guy who got both A-Rod and Pujols in 2001 is anything but inept.