Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who declared that the Shanghia Composite Index was a bubble market and that it would collapse within a certain specific period of time.

Much to this blog's surprise, his prediction turned out to be uncannily correct.

Sornette says there are two parts to his forecasting method. First, he says bubbles are markets experiencing greater-then-exponential growth. That makes them straightforward to spot, something that surprisingly hasn't been possible before.

Second, he says these bubble markets display the tell signs of the human behaviour that drives them. In particular, people tend to follow each other and this result in a kind of herding behaviour that causes prices to fluctuate in a periodic fashion.

However, the frequency of these fluctuations increases rapidly as the bubble comes closer to bursting. It's this signal that Sornette uses in predicting a change from superexponential growth to some other regime (which may not necessarily be a collapse).
While Sornette's success last year was remarkable it wasn't entirely convincing as this blog pointed out at the time