Robert Prechter

Robert R. Prechter, Jr., CMT, began his professional career in 1975 as a Technical Market Specialist with the Merrill Lynch Market Analysis Department in New York. He has been publishing The Elliott Wave Theorist, a monthly forecasting publication, since 1979. Currently he is president of Elliott Wave International, which publishes analysis of global stock, bond, currency, metals and energy markets. He is also Executive Director of the Socionomic Institute, a research group. Mr. Prechter has won numerous awards for market timing, including the United States Trading Championship, and in 1989 was awarded the “Guru of the Decade’’ title by Financial News Network (now CNBC). He has been named ``one of the premier timers in stock market history’’ by Timer Digest, ``the champion market forecaster’’ by Fortune magazine, ``the world leader in Elliott Wave interpretation’’ by The Securities Institute, and ``the nation’s foremost proponent of the Elliott Wave method of forecasting’’ by The New York Times.

Mr. Prechter is author, co-author and/or editor of 13 books, including Elliott Wave Principle – Key to Market Behavior (1978), R.N. Elliott’s Masterworks (1980), The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics (1999), Conquer the Crash (2002), and Pioneering Studies in Socionomics (2003).

Since 1979, when he first addressed the subject, Bob has been exploring socionomics, the study and prediction of social trends in light of the Wave Principle and its implications for the social sciences. In 1999 created the Socionomics Institute, of which he is Executive Director. The institute is an independent think-tank whose mission is to develop socionomics as an academic discipline and to promote its commercial application. Recently, Mr. Prechter has made presentations on his socionomic theory to MIT, the London School of Economics and academic conferences.

In 2004, the Socionomics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, was created to provide education and fund scholarly investigation into socionomic theory.

Mr. Prechter graduated from Yale University in 1971 with a degree in psychology. He served as the 21st president of the Market Technicians Association, and is a member of Mensa, Intertel, The Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society.

Criticism

The Elliott Wave Theory holds that the market follows repeatable patterns based on the classic Fibonacci number series, and that one can effectively time it by following visual patterns. But the notion that the market can be consistently effectively predicted, or "timed," remains a will-o'-the-wisp in the minds of many experts and observers. It is often said that if anyone had a magic black box enabling the market's movements to be effectively called, he wouldn't need to sell a newsletter.

While Mr. Prechter has worn the mantle of Elliott Wave expert for a few decades now, his market predictions over the past two decades have been of questionable merit. One problem for him in adhering to his Elliott Wave theory is that it posits a dramatic decline in the final "Wave C" of the pattern. So while Prechter garnered great acclaim for calling upward movements based on Fibonacci numerical series cycling up, he also then later predicted dramatic, nearly terminal-sounding, declines in U.S. equity markets that never materialized. For many market observers, Prechter and the theory on which his expertise was based lost a measure of credibility. Today, he seems a near afterthought, while market-timing itself has been largely discredited.

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