Research · 01
Associative Remote Viewing applied to stock market prediction_
The Delphi Associates silver futures forecasts and their later replication — the clearest demonstration that ARV can be bound to a live financial outcome, and the clearest illustration of how fragile that binding is.
- 1982 / 1995
- Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, Keith Harary, Jane Katra
- Journal of Scientific Exploration
- ARV
- Financial markets
- Replication
The design
In the Delphi Associates work of the early 1980s, two dissimilar physical objects were each associated with a possible direction of the December silver futures market. A viewer, blind to both the objects and the association, described impressions of the object they would be shown after the market closed. A judge, also blind, matched the description to one of the two objects, and the associated direction became the forecast.
Nine consecutive weekly forecasts were reported correct — a result that made the protocol famous well outside the parapsychology literature.
The 1995 error-detecting protocol
The later pilot study introduced a redundancy mechanism: forecasts were only acted upon when independent viewers converged, and non-convergent trials were discarded rather than traded. Across the reported series this raised the accuracy of retained trials at the cost of a smaller effective sample.
That trade-off is the substantive contribution of the paper. It reframes ARV as a filtering problem — deciding when not to predict — rather than as a raw accuracy problem.
Why it matters to us
Financial targets provide something most psi protocols lack: an unambiguous, externally determined ground truth on a fixed schedule. They also introduce feedback, emotional stakes and selection pressure, all of which contaminate naive analyses.
Our own market experiments treat the Targ protocol as a starting design, not a settled result. We pre-register series length, we publish discarded trials, and we do not count a series as evidence until it has survived an independent replication with a target pool we did not construct.
Reference: Targ, R., Katra, J., Brown, D. & Wiegand, W. (1995). Viewing the future: A pilot study with an error-detecting protocol. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9(3), 367–380.
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