One of the more interesting and unusual technicians I read is Charles Nenner (previously discussed here, here and here).
I am not an Elliot Wave analyst; I don’t really understand the subtleties of it, but I do know it is based upon the Fibonacci Sequence, developed by Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each Fibonacci number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.).
That is the basis of the Elliott Wave Theory, discovered by the Ralph Nelson Elliot.
Charles developed his own proprietary algorithms based on Fractals, recurring cycles and Fourier analysis, which he uses with Elliot Wave analysis. (Complex enough for ya?).
Because his system assumes human interpretation of events never changes, it therefore applies to all four categories of tradable instruments: commodities, currencies, equity indices and interest rate instruments.
A couple of guys nailed the top, and some caught the bottom – Charles is the only guy I know who top ticked the highs in May, and nailed the bottom in June.
>
UPDATE: May 24, 2006 6:30am
The WSJ’s weekend edition had a blurb on Nenner — it answers some of the questions raised in the comments:
Soothsayers
Elaine Garzarelli. Abby Joseph Cohen. And now Charles Nenner?
In every tumultuous market, investors seek out a guru who can divine a market turn. This time, investors are finding comfort in Mr. Nenner, who runs Cycle Forecasting Inc.
Mr. Nenner is about as unconventional as they come. He lives in Jerusalem, spends much of his day studying the Talmud, and sends twice-weekly emails predicting moves in everything from U.S. and European stocks to oil and cattle prices.
Mr. Nenner sent a prescient email predicting that the U.S., Japanese and European stock markets would hit a high on May 10. That day, markets around the globe hit a peak. Since then, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has dropped 5.5% and global markets have fallen further. In late May, Mr. Nenner said the S&P and Nasdaq Composite Index "should now turn down again into 6/14" — a reference to June 14. That too was an on-the-money call; June 14 was the recent low for the stock market.
Now, Mr. Nenner expects stocks to stay strong until July 10 but foresees another weak patch after that.
>
Soft patch? That’s a bit of an understatement — he’s looking for a major drop; Makes my 30% correction look like child’s play.
UPDATE: Aug 7, 2006 4:52:27 PM
Nenner was on CNBC a little while ago, calling for a major top in early September, followed by a deep selloff thru the end of 2006, and then a strong rally thru 2007. Until I see signs that this present trend is weakening, I am somewhat skeptical.
>
Source:
BIDS & OFFERS
A Harvard Man Looks for a Job; Goldman to Keep Power Broker
ANITA RAGHAVAN
WSJ< June 24, 2006
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115111285282589703.html
Elliot Wave is much too subjective. Look at five E-Wave guys and they’ll have five different “counts”.
I trade with a heavy emphasis on technicals for entry/exit timing, and I find E-Wave to be a load of horseshit, personally.
That said, I agree with the basic premise that human interpretation/action/information dissemenation proceeds in a somewhat standard fashion.
And what is this Charles Nener forecasting right now ?
Ahem,
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2006/04/the_squalls_nev.html
As usual, Pete speaks for me, and gets his comment up first, gosh durn it!
Btw, since we are speaking of witchcraft and ouija boards, i’ve posted this link on here before.
astrological finance. hey, you know, i go to this site often just to see what the bradley siderograph is saying. it NAILED the top in May and this graph has been posted all year and has made some absolutely amazing calls over the last decade. it’s hilarious but who knows. just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean there might not be some validity.
http://www.amanita.at/e/faq/e-bradley-com.htm
I really hate E Wave stuff. I don’t think it has any credibility. If Bernanke would have given his speech a week later, would the E Wave guys still have picked the top ? The market reacts to fundamentals, not patterns. Market cycles occur because of financial cycles. The dips occur because of market moving news or incidents.
Did the EWave predict the market fall after 9-11 ? And if 9-11 hadn’t occurred, would have the market fell anyway ?
I started buying back in on Monday. I am up 4% this week. I lost about 2.8% off the peak at the start of the sell off.
“A couple of guys nailed the top, and some caught the bottom – Charles is the only guy I know who top ticked the highs in May, and nailed the bottom in June.”
I sure didn’t miss either by much.
two words:
selection bias
… and what of the hundreds of theories that were wrong? never hear about them. If enough people flip a coin 10 times, a few get 10 heads in a row. Recommend reading Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”
It’s the quantum physics of technical analysis.
I love to see the “witchcraft and ouija board” comments when E-wave comes up.
The fewer people using it the better as far as I’m concerned.
so what is Charles Nenner forecasting now ???
Oh, come on! The quantum physics of TA huh? Well I know a little about quantum physics so why don’t you share it with us. You won’t lose me. Let’s see you hang your balls on the line in a heavy long or short trade based on a wave analysis. I’ve been a heavy trader for a long time and I can assure you their ain’t no one going long or short using that as their primary tool.
I’ll agree it’s anecdotally useful and I actually use it but it is NOT a trading tool. That’s why Mr. Elliot Wave himself, Prechter the Sphincter, has a compounded -18% return for over 20 years using it. If Prechter actually traded with EW, he’d have been bankrupt three years into his worthless recommendations. But, instead he’s profited for twenty years by fleecing the idgits with a newsletter, CDs, books and the sort.
http://tinyurl.com/zv63n
why do we always hear about these savants after the fact ????? never before
Elliot Wave is an excellent tool for evaluating markets in a long term context. The shorter term waves are far more subjective and more difficult to figure out. People are constantly changing the shorter wave counts. EWT works best in free markets. We dont have a free market anymore. If we did, the DJIA would be at about 7,000 right now and heading much lower.
“If we did, the DJIA would be at about 7,000 right now and heading much lower.”
I don’t understand why this would be so. The DJIA is calculated as a function of the sum of the prices of the components times a constant. In order for the DJIA to be 7000 right now the component prices would have to be much lower. Since the overall PE ratio is about equivalent with historical averages (maybe a tad high but not by that much) in order to get to 7000 something would have to happen to the earnings – i.e. PE would go astronomical.
So how does this work to get to a 7000 dow?
The problem with the EWave system is that it predicts waves of a set pattern and magnitude regardless of the financial environment of the market.
If the EWave system used P/Es and/or a number of financial metrics to predict WHEN things were likely to occur, I would be somewhat inclined to believe it.
However, to day that the market goes up and down with waves and that they will have pattern A, B, C… WITHOUT tying when and how big these waves will be to SOME CONCRETE MARKET METRIC is ludicrous.
In reality markets are controlled by a combination of investor psychology and market metrics. Nothing more.
Saying that EWave predicts market movement because waves look similar over time is like saying a VW looks like a Porsche so they must be substitutes. Unfortunately, DETAILS MATTER !
I’m not one to get between a hammer and a nail … But I find EW worthwhile for macro analysis …
For me, the sociology of EW (i.e., the study of social mood) is the true gem.
They’re all “M”s and “W”s right? Actually Bollinger nailed it with his bands showing clearly that low volatility leads to high volatility and vice versa. Which is all that the ewavers do except they put in a lot of mumbo jumbo with it “A of the B of the 3rd of the 4th…”
Thousands of years ago the Japanese rice merchants discerned patterns in the market which they encoded by using sequences of candlesticks. To this day there is nothing better than the candlestick patterns coupled with Bollinger’s invention for a quick, dirty, and largely accurate assessment of the market.
The problem is using such primitive and simplistic tools seems just that, primitive and simplistic. But I’ll put these up against any ewaver anywhere, anytime. Anyone who wants to can simply go to stockcharts, pull up an INDU chart in csticks format, overlay the bolly’s and tell me that you can’t “see the turn points”. The last two are clear as a bell.
Okay, B. I’m long XAU. Out at 144.
“Charles is the only guy I know who top ticked the highs in May, and nailed the bottom in June.”
Isn’t it too early too say that the bottom is/was in June?
Charles is looking for a mild rally, but not much more.
Longer term he’s even more Bearish than me.
Does Ben Bernanke use Elliot Wave? Sounds very econometric.
I do like the Fibonacci name drop. I think there are references to this in Tom DeMark’s stuff. Seems like technicians work hard to make sure that their theories incorporate a reference to Fibonacci sequences, even if it might throw off the model’s accuracy a tad. Self organizing criticality, you know.
I did some Google Scholar dd on EWave a while back, and it seemed like the results were disappointing. Sad, really, as it should at least be treated seriously, if nothing more than to demonstrate its efficacy or lack thereof.
Martin Pring’s analysis is quite bearish also. He’s a technician whose work I respect although I don’t know what his record is like for his advisory service.
John Navin- I agree with that XAU number. I’d be a seller at 145-150 also. Need to get there before The Bear’s jaws clamp shut though. From your site you have an interesting trading orientation.
“Charles is the only guy I know who top ticked the highs in May, and nailed the bottom in June.”
It is too early to tell that it was the bottom. We will probably get a better idea after the Fed meeting next week. I will not be surprised to see 50 basis points hike (less likely but it is possible). The Fed has already fallen behind the curve and needs to catch up (They had considered 50 basis point during their last meeting)
In addition, this questionable bottom was the result of multiple events culminating in one day and has nothing to do with the stock market history and past price patterns.
The bounce resulted from:
1. Unexpectedly, Boeing heavy DOW component (6%) getting a sudden boost from Goldman upgrade, Airbus announcing delays with A380, new large plane order from Singapore – all in one day. As the result Boeing spikes almost 6% and contributes 40 points to the DOW
2. Intel upgraded by Goldman; another DOW component
3. CAT, another heavy DOW component (5.8%) reiterates their upper range earnings forecasts; as the result the stock spikes 5% and adds additional 30 points to DOW
3. Highly leveraged and speculative hedge funds getting relieved from BOJ announcement of no rate hikes in June and continuation of 0% policy; this lead to commodity prices and global markets 2-3% spike.
4. Mother of all Short Squeezes (after 8-9 heavily down trading days)
I do not think Charles (or anybody on this planet) could predict these events happening all in one day from studying the stock market history and past price patterns.
I will finish with a quote from Malkiel: “Multiple studies have revealed conclusively that past movements in stock prices cannot be used to foretell future movements (any more that past flips of a coin will help determine the next flip)…”
“…. History does tend to repeat itself in the stock market, but in an INFINITELY surprising variety of ways that confound any attempts to profit from knowledge of past price patterns…”
In short, the stock market has no memory. The analysts (aka astrologists) are likely to be right about as often as they are wrong, and so constantly find new reasons to believe in their craft.
How does the old joke go? Something like…
Burton Malkiel saw a one hundred dollar bill on the ground and refused to pick it up.
When someone asked him why he didn’t pick it up, he said,”It couldn’t possibly be on the ground, someone would have picked it up already.”
I know nothing about e-wave, but so it is based on fractals? To add to VL’s comments, fractals may be a good model for the stock market. However, self-similar processes (patterns repeating over many different time scales from short to long) describe phenomena with long-range dependence and infinite variance. In other words, dependencies never die out however long a time scale you may go out to, or all events that have occurred have an effect on all events indefinitely out into the future. Which is also actually quite the opposite of saying the stock market has no memory (memoryless processes are the short-range dependent ones).
RB, by “fractals” in EWave, it simply means scaling of a “pattern”. In other words, those 5 waves and ABC corrections are occuring in multiple time frames w/corresponding magnitudes concurrently. It’s why you see all the labeling scheme on E-wave charts… I, II, A, B; i, ii, a, b etc. Each “labeling set”…say capital letters/roman numerals…corresponds to a different fractal level.
Me2200:
You say in first post “The market reacts to fundamentals, not patterns”. But then you say “In reality markets are controlled by a combination of investor psychology and market metrics. Nothing more.”
You need to reconcile the psychology and reaction to patterns. For example, technicals can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a load of people are watching a common TA measure..say a 50EMA and expecting a bounce, they will probably get it as the anticipatory buying creates it’s own fufillment.
Since EWT relies on human psychology and interpretation of events, it seems remiss in leaving out some way to target the typical time frames of human activity. Frankly, “fractalizing” its application in my mind leaves out a very good potential filter.
And B, I’d much sooner incorporate lunar cycles than make trading calls based on EW. I figure if it’s powerful enough to move the oceans and the female menstrual cycle, it could have other psychological effects.
I think people want to make TA way too complicated, searching for a “holy grail”. There ain’t no “there” there, man. My work is really pretty simple.
So he’s either a billionaire or trillionaire, then, right?! LOL
Burton Malkiel beleived several things which have been slowly proven incorrect over time:
1) The market is efficient, which at best, is an overstatement — it is mostly kinda eventually sorta efficient;
2) No one should be able to consistently outperform the market (there are a long lost of people who do);
3) It ignores persistencey of trend, which at this point is fairly well proven;
VL-
Those were a lot of the same thoughts I was having that day. There was an “artificial” bid under the Dow that kept it a 40pts+ (if I remember) most of the morning while everything else was red. The market then used that to pivot on. If not for those factors, it appeared the market was heading DOWN that day.
This rally off of extreme oversolds has been pathetically weak. No follow through. No conviction. According to one of the institutional market makers interviewed on CNBC (Marin of LiquiNet?), the institutions are sitting and waiting. They want to see what the Fed does. Well, there certainly is no volume here lately.
everybody gets their day in the sun, but the
odds of continueing a winning streak, statistically
speaking , appear rather minimal.
I would think that there are enough forecasts
to cover all the dates in a month for a top or a bottom,
so someone , somewhere is going to be right.
There’s an apocryphal story among statisticians that goes like this:
A famous mathematician is having dinner with a number of military commanders, and the subject of Great Generals comes up. The mathematician innocently inquires exactly how one can quantitatively demonstrate what makes someone a great general. After several minutes of discussion with little consensus, the mathematician innocently suggest that someone who has won five battles in a row might be considered a great general. Everyone tends to agree, so the mathematician asks how many generals have won five consecutive battles. The answer generates only a few names, each one considered to be a great general. It is then that the mathematician pounces.
“Suppose we know nothing about the abilities of two opponents in a given battle. Without such knowledge, we can, at best, only assign the chances of victory at 50% for each side. If the total number of generals from each side is 100, we can predict that only 3 will win five battles in a row. Now, can anyone tell me if there is any general who has won 10 battles in a row?”
The point is not to question a military leader’s, or by extension, a trader’s skill – it is to point out that such people SHOULD exist given a large enough data set. In the military, leaders get in trouble when assuming that what worked in the last war will also work in this one (fighting the last war), and the same applies to trading. There’s no magic to what Warren Buffet has done, but for those who’ve made their fortune using technical analysis, why would they ever sell at any price what they were doing? Too many people doing the same thing cannot end well, and I suspect that if Mr. Nenner is really onto something it won’t take long for it to stop working when enough people figure it out.
“although I don’t know what his record is like for his advisory service.”
I must add, if he could actually make profitable calls he would have run a hedge fund for a few years like Jeff Vinik and then retired to manage his own portfolio. Writers of letters are admitting they cannot trade, or even call the market. I learned that by losing money as a Prechter subscriber when I was young and stupid and thought gurus were real and walked the earth. In retrospect his letters were hilarious as they would say essentially that the market was poised to go up or down and then in later letters he would excerpt the parts that had been correct! What a joke! But the laugh was on me as he got my money and I paid market tuition for my folly. Some people may be able to make money with EW, but not me. I say do the work and figure out what works for you. If you can’t make money in the market by yourself, buy Vanguard funds and rebalance or find the next Warren Buffett and load up. If any of this were easy we would all be rich.
Ned-
Agree that we should all do our own work but I was talking (“although I don’t know what his record is like for his advisory service”) about Martin Pring, a technician, not an EW-er to my knowledge, who wrote one of technical analyses best known reference works, Technical Anaysis Explained, and who has recently put out an article about why he thinks The Bear has returned.
As far as making calls go, and the worth of advisory services, Barry has made a few good ones lately, of which the October/November ’05 and June ’06 bottoms, and May ’06 top are the latest, using TA tools and techniques as well as from other disciplines, and has an advisory service as well! So I followed him into the breach and made a quick 3% which I then pocketed just because I saw very little follow-up volume or conviction and because my own analysis indicated this rally would be WEAK. So, I am hopeful of not calling the good folks at Vanguard or installing my Lazyman’s or Couch Potato Portfolio just yet.
Mark,
You are correct, at one point everything else was red and only the Dow was hanging by 40 green points. The bounce was “artificial” – at one point all other indices were sinking down but at the same time the Dow was actually going up (it was very unusual reciprocal move). It almost seemed to me as it was orchestrated or manipulated in hopes of starting the chain reaction and short squeeze (short ratio was very high on that day).
I am not implying anything but on that day after the BOJ announced their 0% rate policy there were sudden multiple upgrades from Goldman for Dow components and multiple Goldman economists had appeared through out the media saying that the economy was strong and the stock market was cheap. (Goldman’s Abby Joseph Cohen was all over the news all day)
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=2077053
Re: Burton Malkiel
Well, nobody is perfect and not everything we say turns out to be truth. Even great thinkers like Albert Einstein were not always right. Even though, some thinkers were more often right than others; nevertheless, all of them were wrong at some time.
In addition, there are always exceptions to the rules and wide spectrum of interpretations.
I think when he was talking about “the market is efficient” and “no one should be able to consistently outperform the market”; he was talking about over the long run – and it may be a very long run – from 1926 to 2004 the total compounded annual rate of return you would have had from blue-chip stocks would have been 10.4% [according to Ibbotson Associates]; but there were periods from 1929 to 1932 during which the US market dropped 83%; or 43% lost between 1973 and 1974; or more recently NASDAQ slippage of 78% from 2000 to 2002.
Re: Charles Nenner’s magic algorithms based on Fractals.
“Mr. Nenner expects stocks to stay strong until July 10 but foresees another weak patch after that.”
How did he come up with July 10th? How did he predict the bounce (some call it the bottom) date of June 14th? How did he come up with the top in May? Was it the result of using his algorithms based on Fractals?
I do not know anything about Mr. Nenner magic algorithms based on Fractals, but surprisingly I was able to come up with very similar dates based on my simple “algorithm” – do not underestimate the importance of BOJ, the largest global cheap liquidity generator.
The BOJ’s liquidity target for financial March 2006 account deposits were 30—35 trillion yen, but the required reserve level is only about 6 trillion yen. This implies 24—29 trillion yen in “excess” liquidity that the BOJ is supposed to reduce to zero. The BOJ has already reduced this liquidity by 17-23 trillion yen from March to May of 2006; but it needs to reduce it by the additional 7 trillion to have the required reserve level of about 6 trillion yen. This is all in addition to BOJ considering ending their cheap money 0% rate policy.
1. May 10th: the top resulted from BOJ squeezing out cheap global liquidity by 17-23 trillion; thus, putting tremendous pressure on hedge funds speculating in global commodities and emerging market bubbles. May 10th the Fed added more salt to the wound and ignited their liquidation. (This was not difficult to predict without algorithms based on Fractals)
2. June 14th (June 15th in Japan): “The Bank of Japan will encourage the uncollateralized overnight call rate to remain at effectively zero percent” (This was not difficult to predict without algorithms based on Fractals. BOJ was not ready to lift the rates right after their huge reduction in liquidity) BOJ announcement lead to commodity prices and global markets 2-3% spike and it was the stimulus for the bounce (some call it bottom) here in the US. (in addition to all other smaller daily catalysts)
3. June 29th: Fed rate hike announcement – moderate market response (25 basis points already priced in) unless it is 50 basis points (less likely but it is possible).
4. Week of July 10th (more specific July 14th): BOJ monetary policy announcement. Goldman Predicts July Rate Hike. (http://feeds.thejapannews.net/?rid=f69230c0bff01fb6&cat=c4f2dd8ca8c78044&f=1)
As the result of this rate hike we will see similar to May 10th sell-off action. (Do you need Mr. Nenner’s magic algorithms based on Fractals to predict it?)
These predictions were derived without Mr. Nenner’s magic algorithms based on Fractals but surprisingly the dates and predictions are almost the same.
I used to follow pretcher too, then I realised
that with the complex fib patterns, the more complex, it was, the easier to explain away missed calls.
Random probability more like it.
VL-
Must have needed extra time to complete the distribution to The Little People.
I remember when Random Walk Became Cool. I was in undergraduate school at the time (around 73 or so) and the finance profs all embraced it immediately which should tell you something given that agreeing about anything new was completely contrary to a viable career path in academe. As I absorbed more of this nonsense over the the next year, it finally dawned on me that they loved it because it explained why none of them were super rich via investments (as opposed to consulting and authoring textbooks) even tho they were supposed to have great insight into the nature of markets. “We don’t understand because it can’t be understood.” Perfect, but they did not extend that to include “so you are crazy to invest at all,” I suppose because that would close the circle and they would be out of jobs.
I was raised on Graham-Dodd and wouldn’t say that fundamental analysis is useless in principle, just that it is useless when the numbers are cooked, which is most of the time. CEO has problem this quarter with EPS? No problem, buy back 2% of the outstanding shares, lose 1% of earnings, and you’ve got “robust 1% growth in EPS this quarter.” Do any of you Fundamentalists bother to look at growth in treasury stock? [deafening silence] When you are gulping down whatever management is spewing about future earnings to estimate EPS, then multiplying that by the entirely arbitrary forward P/E ratio that you use to determine present “value,” don’t you then project things further into the future to guesstimate market price in 1, 3, 5 years? Isn’t that projection based on, dare I say it, trend?
I’ve never understood enough about Elliot Wave stuff to have an opinion about it. But while fundamentals may be of use in determining which stocks you are willing to get stuck with, they say nothing about the entry and exit points which is where even basic TA comes in. If you ignore moving averages and historical resistance/support levels, you have absolutely nothing to guide you in real time except your own greed and fear. Why not quantify the greed and fear of others? There is nothing mystical about that, the charts show it rather plainly.
There have been a lot of hustlers who push “systems” based on magic indicators of one kind or another. Maybe Elliott Wave falls into that category or maybe it doesn’t- the point is that it really doesn’t matter what “moves markets,” you can use TA to analyze what is going on now while the Fundamentalists are still mulling over the previous quarter’s data that is 6 weeks old. Nothing is going to drop money into your lap and you still have to make your own calls and hope for the best- if you have an edge because you bothered to notice that, say, $SPX is currently stuck below resistance at 1260 and you would be a fool to go long until it has closed above that level for at least two days, then you avoided groping around needlessly.
whipsaw. nice post. thanks. earlier I was not attacking Pring. just letter writers and gurus in general.
So what exactly is Neener saying now as of this current time period. Does he still think July 10 is a top for stocks and does he think gold will top in that time frame alos?
i’ve seen this movie before, where one forecaster
gets it right calling several brilliant inflection points,
then newbies like myself make big bets on the next
forecast and come away poor and disappointed.
Remember, Pretcher was really hot after the 82
recession, when he built a large following,,,
dif.not enuff c. renner… cut out the junk,bring on renner.
I too was a victim of Pretcher, I don’t even want to type the name of this fraudster correctly, he’s a thief and a liar. I don’t understand why in America where everybody is sueing, don’t know if I type it correctly, everybody nobody sues him. He 100% misguides people, the tone of his predictions is very convincing but he never admits he’s wrong AND HE HAS BEEN WRONG FOR ABOUT 6 YEARS NOW!! How many times did I read ‘the next month will go down in history because of an incredible crash’ and yes, nothing happened, he has predicted a crash so many times and it never happened. And when a crash will come he will probably take the credit for predicting it, the rat.
And about Elliot Wave, it’s crap, 100% crap. I don’t understand why people fall for it, it’s too difficult and there’s no track record. I started my own system last year and I gained 25,4% and this year I’m at 11,2% and will almost certainly end the year with at least again 25% profit and I’m not even real good. IF YOU DON’T KNOW SOMEBODY’S PERFORMANCE DON’T BOTHER………
High quality postings on this site, for a change.