It's always surprising how certain people can see the future. For example, you see German films from the 20s and they completely saw the rise of (someone like) Hitler. In sports, you hear the commentators sometime guess very specific things. (I often don't know if the transmission is several seconds late and they describe what they see, faking like they are guessing it, but they can't do that for more than a few seconds ahead.)

It partly comes from a good reading of the past and how things advance, but not exclusively (think of the Hitler example). It partly comes from a very good reading of the current situation and the direction of things, projecting forward.
In any case it's really impressive when you see it.
What's even more impressive is how many people don't see anything.

Before Bush was elected there was a great Saturday Night Live sketch which showed the world if each of the candidates got elected. The Bush part showed America burning, and very soon afterward came 9/11, the economy collapsed, etc. The skit wasn't supposed to be prophetic, but my point is that everyone knows what will happen when certain people will get elected, they get elected, and it happens.
Together with seeing the future there are the people who don't see anything.

(Then there are the people who use the blindness of others. Think of the SEC case. Some people don't see the coming collapse, and some people see it, but use what they see in order to gain money, using the blindness of others.)
 
In any case, my interest here is more about the ability of people to actually see the future. It sometimes even comes together with the ability to see the past. Without any knowledge of what happened, just from the current situation, to be able to, correctly, reconstruct the past. It's impressive. Especially when these assumptions are unverifiable and completely hypothetical sometimes for a very long time.