Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

What Works Best Financial Markets GPS or Road Map?

InvestorEducation / Elliott Wave Theory Nov 14, 2012 - 03:02 PM GMT

By: EWI

InvestorEducation

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleSome of the best stories about global positioning systems (GPS's) are the weird detours they sometimes recommend to drivers. Just like some of the weird detours that financial markets can make you take when you think they would be better off going in a straight line either up or down, depending on how you've positioned your trades.


Not long ago, while taking a trip with my family through Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the way to Gatlinburg, Tenn., I decided to use my GPS to drive around the park's western boundary. We wanted to visit Fontana Dam and Cades Cove to see the wildlife. We'd do the go-carts, miniature golf and rides the following day.

From Fontana Dam, my old-fashioned map made it look like it would take the better part of the day to drive around the park to Gatlinburg and then head into Cades Cove from the north. But my new GPS unit suggested that Cades Cove was less than 20 miles away. I could have kissed it -- my GPS was going to save me hours of travel time! Or so I thought. Little did I know until I got there that the road my GPS suggested for the final few miles was only the remnant of an old wagon trail -- and it was a one-way wagon trail, going the wrong way. I had to backtrack and take the much longer path my paper map suggested.

What's the moral of the story? Sometimes the new-fangled gadget is not much of an improvement over what it's designed to replace. Although my GPS unit is great when it comes to identifying the quickest and most efficient route from point A to point B, it sometimes fails to take into account some of those necessary nuances, such as whether a street is one way or whether it might be impassable at times. Every so often, the old-fashioned way of doing things is still the best way.

I believe that's true when it comes to analyzing markets, too. The method I employ every day has been around since the 1930s, and it works as well as, if not better than, any new-fangled technical analysis method for which you must buy some expensive computer software. My method is a form of technical analysis based on the Elliott Wave Principle, which Ralph N. Elliott worked out via hundreds of hand-drawn charts, well before the dawn of charting software. If you like those GPS units that talk you through every turn, you can almost imagine Ralph's voice explaining where to turn as you follow a market. Those directions -- the road map he drew for tradable markets -- have withstood the test of time.

As I found during my trip, detours are a fact of life. They are also a part of market trends. For instance, a bull market shows periods of "punctuated growth" -- that is, periods of alternating growth and non-growth, or even decline. The patterns then build on themselves to form similar designs at a larger size, and then again at an even larger size.

You've probably heard of this idea of repeating patterns on increasing and decreasing levels of scale. This emerging science, which is called "fractal geometry," is a branch of chaos theory. And it is precisely the model identified by R. N. Elliott more than 60 years ago.

(Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.)


Who is Jim Martens? Jim is one of the very few forex Elliott wave instructors in the world, and a long-time editor of EWI's Currency Specialty Service. A sought-after speaker, Jim has been successfully applying Elliott since the mid-1980s, including 2 years at the George Soros-affiliated hedge fund, Nexus Capital, Ltd.

Catch up on Jim's latest thoughts about FX markets and the business of trading them at his Twitter feed.


Download Your Free 14-page eBook: "Trading Forex: How the Elliott Wave Principle Can Boost Your Forex Success"

Here's some of what you'll learn:

  1. Which Elliott waves to trade
  2. Which Elliott waves set up your forex trade
  3. When your analysis is wrong
  4. Guidelines for projecting price targets
  5. How to evaluate an Elliott wave structure
  6. How to use the bigger picture to give you perspective on the market's next major move

Jim also takes you through two real-world trading examples to reinforce what you've learned and apply it to your own trading.

All you need is a free Club EWI profile to download this FREE 14-page eBook now >>

This article was syndicated by Elliott Wave International and was originally published under the headline Which Works Best -- GPS or Road Map? (Part 1). EWI is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts led by Chartered Market Technician Robert Prechter provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

About the Publisher, Elliott Wave International
Founded in 1979 by Robert R. Prechter Jr., Elliott Wave International (EWI) is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.


© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in