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If you want to know where mortgage rates are headed in the future, you may be better off ignoring the experts.

I conducted a 50-week study of the popular Bankrate.com Mortgage Rate Trend Index and it showed that the "expert consensus" on mortgage rates is wrong 3 times more often than it's right.

I am a regular Rate Trend survey participant and have been since 2006.

If you've never seen Bankrate.com's weekly Mortgage Rate Trend Index, it's an informal "future of mortgage rates" poll of loan officers around the country. It's meant to give interest rate guidance to active home buyers and would-be refinancers.

Many survey participants are high-profile and the mortgage rate question posed by Bankrate.com is a basic one:

In your opinion, will mortgage rates move up, down, or remain unchanged 35 to 45 days from now?

Well, mapping the Bankrate survey's majority opinion against Freddie Mac's published mortgage rates 35 days hence, it turns out that the experts guessed right on rates just 23.4% of the time last year.

That's seriously awful. It's less than 1 out of 4. And they're experts.

Now, to be fair, some of the participants fared better than the average including Bankrate.com host Holden Lewis and yours truly. However, predicting mortgage rates remains a huge challenge. Especially 35-45 days into the future.

A lot can change in 6 weeks and last year, a lot did. As the economy dipped and surged, Wall Street tried to come to terms with the future of the economy while Congress and the Fed made new policies to stimulate and/or retard growth, as needed.

Intervention messes with markets and mortgage rates were extremely volatile during the sample period. This is because the mortgage rate that homebuyers see is the result of literally hundreds of factors.

Lenders averaged 1 middle-of-the-day rate change per day last year. That's a lot.

Despite these caveats, though, none of it changes the fact the Bankrate.com survey was actually de-helpful to its readers last year. Homebuyers that relied on the survey for rate lock advice, in hindsight, would have been better off flipping a coin.

According to Bankrate.com, the Mortgage Rate Trend survey is among its most viewed pages on its site. Plus, the survey is syndicated to sites like Yahoo! Business and Fidelity Investments.  Clearly, a lot of Americans are using this thing for rate-locking advice.

It's too bad, really, because the advice they're getting is hardly ever right.

When you need to lock a rate, remember that predicting mortgage rates is a challenge for anybody and the farther out an expert goes on the time line, the more likely his logic will be proved wrong.  Markets and makeup change way too fast.

As a consumer, therefore, the best thing you can do is work with a loan officer that understands how markets move and why they move.  You may not get the best prediction for a rate 2 months into the future, but you'll get an excellent take on what's driving mortgage rates today -- an equally important set of information.

Then, when you can get a heads-up on when rates are rising before it actually happens, that's when you can save yourself some money.  The key is to work with a loan officer that tracks real-time mortgage market data and, more importantly, knows what to do with it.

If you're working with a Call Center-type lender, or just aren't sure whether your loan officer is up to snuff, call or . I track mortgage rates in real-time for all of my clients and I love to work with my blog readers.

Plus, my rates are really good (even if I can't predict them 45 days into the future).

Dan Green is an active loan officer. Email or call 513-443-2020. Dan is on Twitter at @mortgagereports.