Robert Prechter

It was almost lost to history.

Guy named, uh, Robert Prechter, uh, who went to Yale and studied whatever he studied, economics, I think- He basically resurrected this, this framework from the dustbin of history.

I mean, literally, it was almost lost to history.

But essentially what, what Ralph Nelson Elliott figured out is that at, at various timelines, the market moves in a certain pattern, and it's very repeatable, and it's a fractal.

Uh, the bid-ask spreads, the brokerage commissions, and the short-term capital gains taxes incurred from constantly trading in and out of the market to exploit them.

So if charting is basically voodoo wrapped in transaction costs, why do people still follow these technical gurus? Look at Robert Prechter in the 1980s.

He built an empire on this stuff.

Robert Prechter is the archetype of the technical guru life cycle.

He was a former rock band drummer who transitioned to Wall Street, joined Merrill Lynch, and became intensely obsessed with an arcane technical system called the Elliott wave theory.

The Elliott wave theory?

In fact, we had a very famous business cover at the time, the most popular business magazine at the time, Businessweek, had a front page story called Equities Are Dead.

And then a young man came out of Gainesville, Georgia that no one knew of and certainly didn't know of the process that he used, a young man named Robert Prechter Jr. with something called the Elliott Wave Theory, which now a lot of people know of.

And he predicted 3,600 on the Dow.

And if people could, we don't have the access now like we do with the internet and all.

So that's on fundamentals.

Then the next book I would read is a book by Robert Prechter called Socionomics.

Now, I got this recommendation from Avi Gilbert, who publishes extensively on Seeking Alpha, and I learned an awful lot about technical

analysis.

didn't know that.

Okay, well, anyway, I learned an awful lot about technical analysis from Avi.

But Robert Prechter's Socionomics, and there's a fantastic first section in that where he explains to you why trying to invest off the back of the news is a complete waste of time.

And they do some fairly simple analysis to show that under no scenarios does watching the news and reacting accordingly generate a positive return.