Is Insider Trading the Only Way to Make Money in Financial Forecasting?

In efficient markets the current price is the consensus forecast of the market. The only way you're going to do better than a naive forecast in finance is if you have information that the rest of the market doesn't have so you can act on that. One of my students actually found himself working at the Australian Bureau of Statistics where he was handling exchange rate data about 10 minutes before it was published. He set up this game with a colleague and he would text him information and the colleague would place buyers or sales based on whatever the market exchange rate was about to do. This came to the attention of the place and eventually he was discovered and went to prison for it.