Ralph Elliott had the type of career that would be astounding even today...
He is remembered as the father of The Wave Principle, now known as the Elliott Wave Principle which is a number analysis system which can be used to predict many things in life, including market movements.
Elliott was born in Kansas in 1871. In his early career he worked for around 25 years as an accountant, often in executive positions. Many of these positions were held in Central America and Mexico. He learned skills of financial management and corporate reorganisation. In 1924 he became Chief Accountant for Nicaragua.
Later in life he was struck by
illness and turned his attentions to analysis of the stock market. He
was completing a goal that he had expressed in a book he had written
about Latin America: "There is a reason for everything, and it is
[one's] duty to try to discover it."
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Investigating the possibility of form in the marketplace,
Elliott
examined yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and half-hourly charts
of the various indexes covering 75 years of stock market behavior. In
1934 his observations began to form a set of principles about wave
movement and the application to stock prices.
This attention to the detail of time proved to be one of his leading insights. While others had also found patterns in the movements of stock market indices and individual prices, Elliott realised that many of these movements - and waves - took as long as they took. Some would happen quickly and others would seem to take much longer. The point though was these moves were not bound by time or took a certain period to play out in full.
In 1946, his finest work was published, Nature's Law - The Secret Of The Universe. The first 1000 copies sold out quickly to financial analysts and the position in history of Ralph Elliott was set. His research is now used by thousands of fund and money managers around the world to assist their decision making.
Over the years, some practitioners have used wave theory techniques to make predictions of quite amazing accuracy. However, as with any stock price prediction method, most people are not able to use it as well...
In a broader sense, many
have used wave theory to assist with much broader predictions about the
general direction of an economy and macro-economics. These are inexact
sciences at best!
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In the modern financial world, the leading interpreter of wave priciples
is Robert Prechter. Mr Prechter has been a financial columnist and
writer for a number of years and has an excellent reputation in the
investment community for his insights.
This reputation for insights had lead the Elliott Wave website and newsletter to be virtually required reading for anyone in the investment management community - quite an accolade indeed!
I can say quite honestly that I have read many - probably hundreds - of Prechter's articles and columns and I always learn something and enjoy the writing.
Whether you find that their regular newsletters offer the kind of information and value that you look for may be open to debate. However, the company offers many new free reports each year about investment information which will almost certainly prove interesting to the reader, and may offer some winning investment insights.
To read more about Elliott Wave, please visit:
A Short Biography Of Robert Prechter
Elliott Wave Theory For Beginners
Elliott Wave Presentation (pdf)