vnpredict

The problem

Traders, investors, and policy makers act on Vietnam’s monthly macro releases, which arrive from several official and market sources. A forecast helps them when it states its uncertainty and shows how often it has beaten the simplest alternative: carrying the last value forward.

The approach

• Fourteen series (growth rates, interest rates and FX reserves) blend a local AR(1) model with the Chronos-2 foundation model, 12 months ahead: Chronos-2 carries 70% of the weight at the first step and 20% at the last, because these series revert to their mean. The trade balance and the VN-Index use Chronos-2 alone.
• USD/VND is a managed peg, so it uses a robust-drift estimator (a Huber M-estimator of trailing monthly log-returns) with a conformally calibrated band; out of sample it beats both the foundation model and a flat-carry random walk, at MASE 0.88.
• Every forecast is graded over 8 to 12 rolling-origin cross-validation windows against a horizon-matched random walk: good below MASE 1, moderate below 1.5, poor at 1.5 and above.
• The other 16 forecasts use 80% bands from the model that produces them; the scorecard publishes how often backtest outcomes fell inside them (56% to 83%).
• A web-grounded LLM layer writes per-indicator and cross-indicator commentary at forecast time, refreshed with the data on a 14-day cycle.

Architecture

TradingView feeds + official releases → AR(1) and Chronos-2 blend, Chronos-2, robust drift (USD/VND) → 80% bands → rolling-origin grading vs a random walk → web-grounded commentary → dashboard and monthly report

Results

28 indicators tracked and 17 forecast 12 months out, each with a good / moderate / poor grade from 8 to 12 cross-validation windows. On 8 October 2026 the growth-rate and rate series moved from Chronos-2 alone to the AR(1) blend, after the blend beat Chronos-2 alone on the same cross-validation windows. The scorecard read 12 good and 5 moderate on 1 October, and 14 good and 3 moderate (MASE 1.04 to 1.09) on 15 October, with none poor; all 17 grades are published. Each issue of Vietnam Macro Monthly prints to PDF or downloads as an editable deck.