First, this paper presents a total ordering of the theoretical lower bound loss of different forecasting paradigms in the following descending order: Model selection, Model combination, Non-parametric univariate models, and Non-parametric multivariate models. Second, we create a generalized forecasting framework to test the above forecasting paradigms ex-ante. We implement the framework by creating a novel datacube consisting of daily stock prices and 100,000 quarterly reports from about 1600 global companies and several daily macro time series, all from 2000 to spring 2022. Lastly, we utilize the framework and show that modern multivariate time series approaches are powerful but domain-dependent. We demonstrate the domain-dependent accuracy by showing convincing results when predicting corporate bankruptcy risk, moderate results when predicting stock price volatility, and lacking results when finally predicting company market capitalization. Given the domain-dependent convincing results and mostly unrealized theoretical lower bound loss of multivariate approaches, we hope to encourage further research on non-parametric, multi-signal approaches that leverage a wider array of available information.