Augur
Categories: Econ
Well, technically, an augur is a digging tool for fence holes. But it's also used as a snooty defensive verb as in, "The fact that we found your finger prints on the knife, Colonel Mustard, does not augur well for your honeymoon with Miss Scarlett."
In the old days (and maybe some places now), fortune tellers and shaman and other similar supernatural predictor types would use various instruments to augur. Read tea leaves. Interpret entrails. Decipher the pattern of birds in flight. That type of thing.
In the modern financial world, these kinds of professions have been replaced by economists and analysts, who attempt to augur the direction of the market based on such tea leaves as economic data or corporate results.
