One thing you have to learn in the investment business if you’re going to be successful is who to listen to, and more importantly who not to. Stats show 95% of stock investors lose money over a complete business cycle.
When I was thirteen, my father, an active investor, took me to one of the brokerage firms where he had an account. After our visit I asked him, “If investing in stocks is such a good way to make money, how come all those brokers aren’t rich?” I never forgot his answer: “Son, none of those fellows’ own stocks. They see how few clients make money over time.” I later learned Dad never used a broker for advice; always did his own research and always made his own decisions…all the way into his eighties.
His investing style was keeping all his eggs in one basket but watching those eggs very closely.
I started risking my money investing in the early 1980’s. I already had learned not to listen to brokers, but I figured that if I followed the best independent minds in the business and used a consensus of their opinions I would be successful. So I started there.
In the late 1970’s I read every book by these experts, and I subscribed to a number of their investment letters. They were all calling for a coming depression…all except one. Robert Prechter had just published the Elliott Wave Principle (1978), predicting a great bull market. I had bought his book as well, but only read the first chapter. After all, his forecast was completely contrary to everyone else, so why would I listen to him?
But I was wrong: Many years later, the noted market analyst James Cowen, said “…that 1978 prediction must go down in history as the most remarkable stock market prediction of all time”.
My interest in investing faded for a while as I focused on my businesses. While I continued to follow the markets and did some investing it wasn’t until the late nineties, after I had sold my businesses that I went back to investing full time. It was a time of historic optimism and a booming stock market. They said it was a new era and the Dow was going to 100,000!
By then the financial industry had exploded in size from 2% of GDP to 15% and with all sorts of fancy new products and services, and many more loud voices. But I had learned the hard way, listening to the crowd was not the way to go. I turned to Robert Prechter, the lone voice that had proved to be right. I dusted off his book from 1978 and studied it front to back until I understood it, and started subscribing to Elliottwave International (EWI), the company Prechter had founded. (EWI is now the world’s largest market forecasting company; among its subscribers are most major global financial institutions and over 500,000 sophisticated investors). Prechter is now a legend in the financial industry.
RN Elliott, in 1942 when he forecasted (accurately) the end of the great depression, said there would not be another depression for 70 years (update 2022 – it’s now been 80 years).
The entire economic and financial industry herd was saying it was a new era and predicting an economic boom for many decades. They completely missed the .com bubble collapse of 2001, and the 2008 crisis. Why? Because the tools they use simply don’t work.
I would encourage everyone to do your own research and ignore the economic and financial industry herd. History shows they are always wrong at major turns in the markets and the economy, and they are about to bankrupt those that listen to them.
The facts show that the four greatest market forecasts in history were all made by the foremost Elliott Wave experts. After 35 years of investing in the stock market, and having become an ardent student of history, and how markets behave and the world works, I am convinced the Elliott Wave Principle is, as its discoverer named it eighty years ago-Nature’s Law.
Here are some of Robert Prechter’s comments (2019):
Man, oh man, what a change is near. Almost no one has a clue about what’s about to transpire. When the tide turns, the burdens that optimistic, careless people have placed on the economy will finally crush it. The downturn will seem to come out of the blue, but it has been germinating for a long, long time.
The ebullience of 2000 was amazing, and the indulgence of 2006-8 was flabbergasting. Now words are insufficient to convey the breadth and depth of the financial insanity that exists. The stock market is overvalued but no one thinks it matters, the economy is dying, yet economists think it’s fine, real estate is weighed down by debt, yet institutional investors are buying tens of thousands of homes, to flip. The amount of risky debt is so huge that it can never be repaid and the public is gorging on it at a record pace. Most people and institutions, including governments, are broke but they don’t know it.
The risk in the stock market is epic. Its technical condition – as revealed in the many charts and indicators we have shown over the past two years has staggering implications
The worldwide money system has made preserving wealth nearly impossible. And if in a future panic central banks opt to recall cash, even cash holders will be doomed.
If you want to know where we’re headed and why you should listen to Prechter and Elliott Wave International, and if you want to know what life will be like and how you can survive and prosper go to: safefuturegroup.org