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Prechter, a soft-spoken, thoughtful, engaging 60-year-old, believes that the bull market of the past eight months that pushed the Dow past 10,000 will inevitably give way to a crash that will drag prices well below the level of early March. He believes this because theories of market behavior put to paper by a guy who died in 1948 tell him so. Yet he makes it all sound perfectly plausible...
...playing drums in a pop-music group that never hit it big, Prechter joined Merrill Lynch in 1975 to do technical analysis, also known as chart-reading - the search for patterns in the movements of securities. The most famous of technical approaches is Dow theory, a rough model of market waves originally described by Wall Street Journal co-founder Charles Dow at the turn of the 20th century and refined and popularized in the subsequent decades by Journal editor William Peter Hamilton. Prechter studied Dow theory but soon moved on to the mostly forgotten work of Ralph Nelson Elliott...
...republished Elliott's books and in 1979 went into the forecasting business for himself at what he dubbed the Elliott Wave Institute. In 1981 he moved his operation to Gainesville, Ga., an hour north of Atlanta, and he's been there ever since. His accurate forecasts of a stock-market boom in the 1980s and a crash in the autumn of 1987 made him, for a time, one of the most influential Wall Street gurus. After the market started its 1990s bull run, though, Prechter seemed to lose his touch. In 1995 his book At the Crest of the Tidal...
...other words, he's wrong a lot. But so are conventional economic forecasters, especially at the market turning points that can have the biggest impact on investors' portfolios. This is because, Prechter argues, standard economic models of financial markets depict prices as reflections - imperfect, perhaps, but still reflections - of true value. He believes instead that "waves of social mood are the driving factor" of both market moves and, to a certain extent, economic reality. He calls this approach socionomics, and he's doing what he can - his Georgia operation now includes a socionomics institute - to push it onto academic curriculums...
...that's happened only at a few off-the-beaten-track colleges. But mainstream economists, who had long dismissed market cycles as nonsense, have begun to come around at least a little. Yale's Robert Shiller describes market booms and busts as the product of fashion and animal spirits. A trio of academics revisited a famous 1934 paper that debunked the predictions of Dow theorist Hamilton and found that, adjusted for risk, Hamilton's predictions beat the market. MIT's Andrew Lo, a top finance scholar, has made technical analysis one of his main research topics. So maybe there...