A lot of financial institutions have been using webbot for the last 15 years.
I think that bears further substantiation, D -- e.g. used
how? By
whom? To make what decisions with how much investor money? Did investors know? And did it outperform basic market indices over a statistically significant period of time? Cos a prediction system that can consistently outperform basic market indices is better than many financial institutions.
Bear in mind too that there have been some pretty crazy schemes to pick prices. One of my favourites was the "three up, two down" theory -- which claims that economic indices (those jaggy lines tracking the prices of shares, currency etc...) always take three steps up and two steps down. The cute disclaimer is that those indices are highly fractal, so if you didn't see the pattern at the scale you were looking at then surely you were looking at the wrong scale. And yes, people do give money to such systems-- which I think says more about the quality of the people than the quality of the systems.
They did accurately predict the Oct 2008 economic collapse.
Again, I think it bears further substantiation. Many charlatans shotgun-spray vague predictions until one sticks and then match retrospectively. It's called "rain-making": you do your dance and get credit for when the rain comes, but don't get debited when it doesn't, and nobody ever examines your methods.