Elliott Wave Principle - Rediscovery and Current Use

Rediscovery and Current Use

Robert Prechter came across Elliott's works while working as a market technician at Merrill Lynch. His prominence as a forecaster during the bull market of the 1980s brought the greatest exposure to date to Elliott's work, and today Prechter remains the most widely known Elliott analyst.

Among market technicians, wave analysis is widely accepted as a component of their trade. Elliott's Wave principle is among the methods included on the exam that analysts must pass to earn the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation, the professional accreditation developed by the Market Technicians Association (MTA).

Robin Wilkin, Ex-Global Head of FX and Commodity Technical Strategy at JPMorgan Chase, says "the Elliott Wave principle ... provides a probability framework as to when to enter a particular market and where to get out, whether for a profit or a loss."

Jordan Kotick, Global Head of Technical Strategy at Barclays Capital and past President of the Market Technicians Association, has said that R. N. Elliott's "discovery was well ahead of its time. In fact, over the last decade or two, many prominent academics have embraced Elliott’s idea and have been aggressively advocating the existence of financial market fractals."

One such academic is the physicist Didier Sornette, professor at ETH Zurich. In a paper he co-authored in 1996 ("Stock Market Crashes, Precursors and Replicas") Sornette said,

It is intriguing that the log-periodic structures documented here bear some similarity with the "Elliott waves" of technical analysis ... A lot of effort has been developed in finance both by academic and trading institutions and more recently by physicists (using some of their statistical tools developed to deal with complex times series) to analyze past data to get information on the future. The 'Elliott wave' technique is probably the most famous in this field. We speculate that the "Elliott waves", so strongly rooted in the financial analysts’ folklore, could be a signature of an underlying critical structure of the stock market.

Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire commodity trader, calls Prechter and Frost's standard text on Elliott "a classic," and one of "the four Bibles of the business":

Technical Analysis of Stock Trends and The Elliott Wave Theorist both give very specific and systematic ways to approach developing great reward/risk ratios for entering into a business contract with the marketplace, which is what every trade should be if properly and thoughtfully executed.