What makes a good predictor is a very interesting subject to those involved in financial markets. Tyler Cowen highlights an excerpt from a piece by Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock:
"…what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability from the utterly hopeless was their style of thinking. Experts who had one big idea they were certain would reveal what was to come were handily beaten by those who used diverse information and analytical models, were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and kept their confidence in check."
Having one big idea might be a dangerous thing for money managers, but it seemed to work for some people who shorted the housing market. The way to reconcile these two facts could be that the people who made money shorting the housing market weren't applying their one big idea about the future downfall of America or the idea that easy money is going to destroy the economy, but instead were the type of people who came to their conclusions about the housing market after studying various metrics and utilizing different analytical models.
It should be noted that just because the experts who are supporting their one big idea might be worse predictors in general, they may not be wrong in the long run. Those who favor a long gold strategy tend to have one big idea: You can't trust fiat currency (particularly the fiat currency of the United States), as throughout history all fiat currency has approached zero. They see every sign of inflation as a sign that gold should go up in value and every sign of deflation as a sign that gold should go up in value. Even though they have the wrong cognitive approach, over the past 10 years they've been right far more often than they've been wrong. If someone marginally familiar with Tetlock's research decided to sell gold because they didn't like the arguments of people buying gold they would have lost a lot money.