August 2002 issue © August 20, 2002 The Socionomics Department of Elliott Wave International seeks a budding socionomist to assist in all aspects of its endeavors, with emphasis on providing the socionomic perspective to current events and academic studies. If you have read The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and “get it” and would like to play a role in introducing socionomics to the world, please contact Gordon Graham by email at
[email protected].
Optimism from a Safety Advocate Conquer the Crash advocates financial safety. Bulls deride it as a “doom & gloom” book, but the fact is that doom and gloom are the signed, sealed and delivered products of bulls. They have decimated investors who acted on their cavalier assurances. My message avoids doom and dispels gloom. Holding T-bills has provided wonderful benefits, with no risk at all. “Short” index funds are making speculators great money. The emails we get from thrilled subscribers who are sunny and optimistic about their future attest to these facts. Do you want to be happy? Read a doom & gloom book. Some Comments on the Stock Market
A CRASH IS IMMINENT
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The media are filled with speculation, almost daily and often in the lead story, that the low on July 23 was the low for the March March 2 2000 bear market. There is no way that it was the low for the bear 2002 market. b 1 Among all classes of technical indicators, only one had You Are C 4 A Here Now some elements in place for a bottom, the “momentum” indicators, which got oversold in July. My first response is, “So what?” 3 B That’s what bear markets do: They get these indicators oversold, 2 5 sometimes over and over. This is a Grand Supercycle bear a market. Future oversold conditions will be breathtaking in Sept. comparison. Further, we know that high readings on momentum 2001 1 indicators such as ARMS (TRIN) and VIX are a hook because July newspapers have been writing them up. Newspapers do not 2002 4 call turns except when they insist that they are not there. Did newspapers announce the top? Did they announce the 1974 3 low? How could they, when their role is to reflect the opinions of society, which create the highs and lows? Further, no one is talking about the momentum on the rally, which has been lousy Idealized S&P even from the standpoint of a bear market rally, much less a Wave Pattern 5 bull market liftoff. Breadth has been moderate and volume c unremarkable, and it has been slowing across the board in terms © August 2002 Elliott Wave International (a) of breadth, volume, tick extremes and rate of price change. At this point, much of the oversold condition of July has been worked Figure 1 off. Now let’s review the other classes of indicators. Elliott waves are not done yet. Figure 1 shows an updated arrow on the You Are Here chart. I will probably revise the degrees downward soon depending upon market action, but so far, it’s been a great guide.
You can always get The Elliott Wave Theorist instantly upon release; for information, visit www.elliottwave.com.
The Elliott Wave Theorist — August 20, 2002
Reprinted from the July 31, 1998 Elliott Wave Theorist
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The rally for wave 2, which has lasted four weeks so far, has been taking the typical A-B-C shape of a bear market rally. The Dow and S&P are carrying right to the targets that we listed in The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast. (Even if it were to exceed these levels, it would still be a bear market rally.) If this labeling is valid, the next event will be wave 3. Since the third wave is typically the most powerful wave in a sequence, the next decline should be strong enough to qualify as a crash. Figure 2 shows the first two points of potential support from a study published four years ago in the August 1998 EWT. Wave structure shows not even temporary support in the DJIA until the upper 3000s, which is the corresponding point in the preceding wave pattern where the 1929 crash stopped. So, radical as it sounds, the Dow should erase its next 5000 points without much trouble.
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Valuation remains outrageous. Price/dividend, price/earnings and price/book all remain above levels that they have obtained at market tops of the past century, much less the bottoms. Attempts to explain them away are nothing but rationalization of an intense optimistic impulse. Psychology is way too complacent for a bottom. Consumers are bullish, there are more bulls than bears among market newsletters, put/call ratios got only to neutral at the recent low, and a USA Today/Gallup analysis, reported on August 12, reveals “a deep well of optimism” among Americans. Doing their part, economists keep pointing to the caboose (economics statistics) and saying that all is well, but the locomotive (symbolized by the stock market) has already headed off the trestle. Expect “surprising” bad news on the economy over coming months. On July 24, 2002, as the market was at its utmost downside extreme to date, CNBC did an online poll and asked investors what they were going to do. Fully 83 percent of the 2700 respondents replied, “Hold on.” In June 1984, undoubtedly that same percentage was saying “hold on,” but it was in reference to T-bills. It kills me to read things like this: “Strategists see the July low as an invitation to investors to put money in stocks again.” What money? It’s already in. “Again”? Whoever told them to stop? We here at Elliott Wave International usually see things in the opposite way from most, and this is no exception. We see the rally as a silver opportunity (the golden opportunities are all gone) to get out or add to shorts. Here’s another comment: “I don’t recall so much pessimism about both the short-term and long-term outlook for stocks.” What do we learn from that? He has a short memory. There was more pessimism in 1988 and 1994, much less in 1974 or 1942. Finally, July 2002 was way too early for the bear market to end. The Value Line arithmetic and S&P 600 Midcap indexes made all-time highs in April 2002. These new highs were the final achievement of a four-year topping process dating from April 1998. Three down months is an inadequate resolution for a fouryear top. No major bear market has ended three months after significant stock sectors peaked, and none of the technical indicators imply that this one will be an exception. Although the average stock is down 50 percent (per the Wilshire 5000, the S&P 500 and the average of the Dow and the NASDAQ) and many stocks have crashed, the psychology of the marketplace reveals that this bear market in fact has barely begun. We are witnessing an impressive mechanism of a Grand Supercycle bear: both professionals and the public refusing to capitulate despite increasingly devastated portfolios. Simply stated, this situation will change when hope is overcome by fear. Until further notice, the phrase that will provide perspective during all fluctuations is, “It’s a bear market.” That quiet mantra will serve well in down days but even better in rallies. Recall, for example, what The Elliott Wave Theorist said on May 14, 2002: Another Selling Opportunity in the Making The rally since September 2001 (which EWT called for in the 9/11/01 issue) has been strong enough in selected secondary issues to propel two stock averages, which are constructed so as to reflect this bias, to new all-time highs. While the first quarter of 2000 presented a whale of a selling opportunity for the S&P and the NASDAQ, the current rally is creating one just as good for many sectors of the market. On this basis, traders should move from 100% short to 150% short. Investors, of course, should remain fully in cash or in Rydex Ursa, Prudent Bear or other comparable “bear” fund. The S&P 600 Midcap index and the Value Line arithmetic averages, which at the time were rallying just underneath all-time highs (see Figure 3), topped the next morning. The S&P held above 1100 for the next three days. All these indexes fell 30 percent in the ensuing two months (see Figure 4). These averages will fall 30 percent quite a few times before this bear market is over. That may sound extreme, but a number of aggressive mutual funds have already fallen more than 75 percent, which is 50 percent twice and 30 percent four times.
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The Elliott Wave Theorist — August 20, 2002 Reprinted from the May 14, 2002 Elliott Wave Theorist 2000
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Sages for the Ages If you want input from true stock market sages, I recommend the veterans first. Richard Russell’s Dow Theory Letters are cogent and steeped in experience. I read Russell during the latter half of the bear market of 1966-1974, one of the trickiest on record, and he was brilliant throughout, never succumbing to the lure of the huge rallies of the period. Less than a month after the 1974 bottom, he turned bullish. Dick’s daily comments are the talk of the ’net, and his Primary Trend Index keeps him on the right side of the market long term. Contact him at PO Box 1759, La Jolla, CA 92038. James Dines’ The Dines Letter makes stunning calls on long-term trends, typically in areas where no one is looking. You can read how Jim conquered the 1966-1974 bear market in his book, The Invisible Crash, recommending gold all the way before issuing a long-term buy signal on stocks in 1982. In the late 1990s, he rode the Internet stocks, and recently he rode the gold mining issues. Subscribe from PO Box 22, Belvedere, CA 94920. Do you think this bear market will fool these guys, who have been following markets since 1957 and 1961? Forget it. Elliott Wave Ranked #2 in Timer Digest We at Elliott Wave International are proud that Timer Digest has ranked us #2 in the country for the first half of the year among some 100 market forecasting publications. You can subscribe to Timer Digest by writing to PO Box 1688, Greenwich, CT 06836. We are right behind Arch Crawford, another veteran who has also been right on top of this bear market. By the way, I recommend Crawford Perspectives, which you can order by emailing
[email protected].
AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB PRECHTER (PART ONE) On May 28, 2002, Jim Puplava interviewed Robert Prechter about his new book, Conquer The Crash. Jim is the host of Financial Sense Newshour, a weekly Internet radio broadcast. Jim’s website www.financialsense.com is known for its interviews and editorials from experts in financial and geopolitical fields.
TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW Conducted May 28, 2002 (Dow 10,000+); posted June 1 Robert R. Prechter, Jr., author and CEO of Elliott Wave International Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression Editor’s Note: We have edited the interview in this transcription for clarity and readability. The original real audio interview may be heard on Jim’s Ask The Expert page at www.financialsense.com. JIM PUPLAVA: Joining me on the program is Robert R. Prechter, Jr. Bob first heard about the Wave Principle back in the 1960s as an undergraduate studying psychology at Yale. While working as a Technical Market Specialist at Merrill Lynch in New York in the mid 1970s, he located the only available copies of R.N. Elliott’s original books in a New York library. He also wrote, with A.J. Frost, Elliott Wave Principle, Key to Market Behavior. Over the next two years, he started The Elliott Wave Theorist, a publication devoted to the analysis of the U.S. financial markets. During the 1980s, Prechter won numerous awards for market timing as well as the United States Trading Championship, culminating in Financial News Network, which is now CNBC, granting him the title “Guru of the Decade.” In 1991, he was elected and served as the president of the national Market Technician’s Association. He has written numerous books, including At the Crest of the Tidal Wave and The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior Today we are going to talk about his new book, Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression.
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Bob, back in November 1978, with the DOW at 790, you predicted a great bull market ahead. You were well ahead of everybody else at the time, and you saw it sooner than most people. To your credit, you also got out, but you admit that you got out too early. What did you see back in 1978, and what are you seeing now, that makes you hesitant about the market? ROBERT PRECHTER: Well, we saw a lot of things in 1978. The main one was a bullish picture from the Wave Principle — the long-term pattern in the Dow Jones Industrials going back to 1932. Of course, all of the practitioners of the Wave Principle since R.N. Elliott had labeled the waves in real time essentially the same way. It was really a matter of saying, “Now is the time.” There were other elements that helped a lot. One of them was the feeling of crisis in the late ‘70s. Inflation was running away, bond prices were falling, and we had several recessions in a row. That kind of background gives you a good base of fear, which means that people who are invested in stocks tend to lighten up because they feel that the only way they can go is down. There were many psychological measures saying the same thing. That’s terrific support for a bullish wave expectation because when people are mostly out of the market, as they were in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, it means that if the trend changes or psychology changes, it’s going to change for the better. So that was the backdrop for that situation. JIM: In the preface to your book, Conquer the Crash, you’ve got a warning. You said, “I’ve been wrong before,” and I want to give you credit for admitting that — very few people can. But what’s the downside risk, if you’re wrong about a recession or a depression and crash? BOB: Well, I tried to formulate a strategy so that, no matter what happened in the market, people who took the strategy wouldn’t lose money. We’ve got an extremely safe portfolio suggestion in the book, and that’s of course, if you’re not really motivated to seek profits in a bear market. But I would really suggest to your readers who’ve been around awhile that bear markets are much swifter than bull markets. They cover territory a lot faster. So if you can take one of the half a dozen ways I suggest in the book for making money on the downside, you should do that. One of the suggestions I have is a way that you can make money no matter which direction the market goes, and that’s very attractive to me. JIM: There was a great stock market trader by the name of Jesse Livermore, and that was the one thing he always said. He didn’t care which direction the market was going. He’d be short just as easily as he could go long. He made a lot of money going short. In fact, I think he made something like a hundred million on the day that the stock market crashed. So, as you point out in your recommendations, it’s also a great way to make some money. BOB: I would like to add one thing. I think it’s wrong for people to conceive of the market going either up or down. Every one of these indexes that we’re watching is nothing but a ratio. It could be stock shares per dollar. If you invert it, you get dollars per stock share. It all depends on whether you want to be long the stock market or long dollars. Those who trade currencies know this. If you’re tracking the yen, it’s either the yen in terms of dollars or dollars in terms of yen. Depending on which country you’re in, you can call it a bull market or a bear market with the exact same changes in price. People need to reorient to the fact that, if they’re only comfortable with rising trends, they should flip the ratio around and say O.K., now my dollars are going up in price relative to stocks. JIM: Let’s talk about this book, which you’ve broken up into two parts. The first part is why you feel there will be a stock market crash, monetary deflation and an economic depression. In the second part, you talk about how to protect yourself from deflation and depression. Let’s start with the case for a crash and depression. Why a crash and a depression?
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BOB: I think the main tipoff that we’re there already — of course there are several, and I detail them all in the book — but the main one is that we’ve reached an extreme valuation on the upside in stock prices and then reversed. Each time that an extreme anywhere near what we have has happened in the last 300 years — and of course the recent one is much more extreme than any of those in the previous 300 years — the decline in the stock market thereafter brings out a severe contraction in the economy. The reason is that the public gets involved in the stock market at those times. There was a poll done in 1952 and another one done in 1982. They found that less than 10% of the public was involved in the stock market. Of course today, that’s up to 50% or 60%, depending on how you count it. This means that many people have their fortunes wrapped up in stock prices. When they come down, it means that many more people are going to suffer as a result, and I don’t mean just suffer financially but economically as well. JIM: Let’s begin with this myth of the new era. You identify very well in your opening chapter of this book the economic myth that we’ve had of a new era with superb economic growth and earnings. Address that issue, because a lot of people have not seen through it yet. BOB: The famous “new economy,” right? The first graph in the whole book is a lot of fun. It shows the number of times in news articles that the term “new economy” appeared in the news worldwide. Of course, it peaks out in the year 2000, with over 4000 mentions of the “new economy.” So it was a really hot topic in 2000. The question is, does the emperor have any clothes on? And we find out that he really didn’t. The talk of the new economy was engendered almost entirely by psychology and the optimism and ebullience that was going on. It was independent of the stock market, but it showed up in the stock market. What we didn’t have, in actuality, was a new economy. All you have to do is look at the figures and compare those powerful bull market years from 1974 to 2000 with an equivalent time period of rising stock prices from 1942 to 1966. We found out that, in every case (and some of these numbers are very interesting), what we call the fifth wave — the rise from 1974 — was weaker from gross domestic product to industrial production, capacity utilization, the unemployment rate and right through to all the measures of debt and liquidity and interest rates. We had a much stronger period in the 1940s and 1950s into the early 1960s than we did from the mid-1970s until the year 2000. It’s clear, across the board, in all of these figures. So, my question is, where is the new economy? And the answer is, we didn’t have one. JIM: That was very clearly stated in your book. You also showed charts. We’ve got this myth — maybe it was helped along by the financial media — of companies beating expectations with superb profits. There is a falseness to some of these numbers. But I want to go on and talk about something that’s very different today. That is the level of debt. We heard all these wonderful stories in the ‘90s about the government paying down the deficit — and that’s a story in itself — but corporate debt went up and consumer debt levels went up as a percentage of GDP. We’ve got installment debt, credit card debt at record levels, corporate debt at record levels and more surprising, and going along with that, we have a negative savings rate. I wonder if you might address how these conditions spell an end to a boom, because you can’t borrow your way to prosperity. BOB: I think you hit the nail on the head. Here are some of the figures that you were talking about. During that third wave, from 1942 to 1966, consumer debt was only 64% of annual disposable personal income on average. At the end of the fifth wave in the year 2000, it was 97%, and as you point out, right now, it’s over 100%. So debt is greater than annual disposable income. We had total credit market debt at 150% of GDP back in the third wave. It’s 300% today — double that amount. So three times annual GDP is what we owe. I think this is fascinating. The prime rate was 3.75% on average during the 1942 to 1966 period. It was just under 10% on average between 1974 and 2000. That to me — and we’re going to get to that later in our discussion I hope — is the big problem. It’s one thing to have an unprecedented amount of debt outstanding,
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but it’s another to have that debt saddled with a high real rate of interest, because that rate of interest is larger than the economy can produce. JIM: This is one reason why we don’t see real bottom-line numbers of companies discussed any more. One of the real profit killers, at least from what I’ve seen from a fundamental point of view, is this record amount of corporate debt and rising interest rates. That interest expense is just killing and decimating corporate profits…. BOB: Except for the banks. JIM: Yeah, well, they’re making money on this, but for how long? BOB: Exactly. JIM: I want to talk about this debt situation. They release this number every month. Let’s take personal income and personal expenses for the month of April. Personal income went up 3/10 of a percent, and yet personal spending went up 5/10 of a percent. They never talk about that as being negative. That tells me that Americans are increasingly relying on debt to support their lifestyles. BOB: When I did the research for this book, I found an amazing fact. Do you know there are two very solid countries in the world, where the finances are strong and the government has very little debt, where the citizens are saving 25% of their annual income or more, and in one of these countries it has gone up to 40% occasionally? Here in the United States, as your statistics just revealed, we have a negative savings rate. On average, people are spending more than they’re making. Where is it coming from? They’re borrowing, and they’re also pulling it out of whatever savings they have left. JIM: That’s why when I see these economists talking about these 3% and 5% growth rates for the economy in the 2nd half and then this miracle of corporate earnings going up 30% and 40%, I wonder what they are looking at. I mean, do consumers go out and go into a minus 5% or minus 6% savings rate? I just don’t think that’s going to happen. BOB: I think most of that, although they would never admit it, is from hope. Because they say the only way that the stock market can hold up — and the only way that any of this debt can get paid off — is if corporate earnings start soaring and people’s incomes start soaring at some massive double-digit rate. So they’re saying, “Well, I guess that’s what’s going to happen.” I think the burden of debt is piled up so high that it’s not only impossible, but that is the reason why we need to be looking in the other direction. JIM: Let’s address the issue of these rising interest rates in comparison, let’s say, to previous boom periods. Today we have corporate debt valued at about 60% of total assets on the balance sheet. You’ve got consumer debt valued at over 100% of disposable income, and this is all occurring, Bob, at a time when interest rates are not only high but also in the process of rising. Let’s address that issue in terms of what it portends for the economy and the markets ahead. BOB: Well, in and of itself, a rising interest rate is not necessarily really negative. We had a steadily rising interest rate throughout the 1970s, but at the time, it was chasing inflation. Today when you look at the PPI and the CPI and other measures of goods prices, you find no inflation in those areas. The money is going into the investment areas. The problem is not just rising rates, but rising real interest rates against in a slowing economy. We just talked about the slowing in the economy during the ‘80s and ‘90s compared to the ‘50s and ‘60s, but we’ve also had a slowing even in the ‘90s themselves versus the ‘80s and then again in the last few
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years of the ‘90s compared to the earlier ‘90s. Profit growth was averaging almost 11% in the ‘80s. It was averaging 8.8% in the ‘90s and in the last few years only 4.5%. So you can see that the economy’s been slowing all the way. Not only do I think that the rising burden of interest was slowing the economy, but there was also a focus on finance instead of production. People thought they could get rich manipulating stock shares and debt and that sort of thing instead of actually producing goods. Now you’ve got an economy that’s producing at a very slow rate and yet the burden of interest is high. That’s a double train wreck. That’s two trains heading toward each other at 90 miles an hour. JIM: Isn’t there also a problem with the fact that during the ‘90s, many industrial companies — like IBM or General Electric — morphed themselves into finance companies? They were making more money on finance than they were by actually making things. BOB: Oh, yeah. General Electric, for example, transformed itself from perhaps the premier manufacturing company in the world in the 1950s and ‘60s to what I call a house of cards right now. It’s all about manipulating credit, manipulating debt. They’re lending, they’re borrowing, they’re shifting money around, they’re shifting credit around. We put out a special chart on General Electric in the first days of October 2000 and said, “This bull market is over. The stock is up 100 times from its low in 1974, and it’s over.” It’s since been cut in half, and frankly, I think it’s just the beginning. GE is not Enron, but it is that type of financial company where, ultimately, the trend in finance and investments is going to be the trend in that company’s fortunes. It will be a slower decline than Enron’s, and there’s certainly less in the way of accounting gimmicks, but it uses them anyway, and people have noticed it. I think it’s going to take a long time for GE to return to a solid company that’s producing things that people really want. JIM: Now, in your book, Conquer the Crash, you’ve drawn a lot of similarities to the U.S. in the 1920s and a similar experience in Japan. I want you to comment on those two. BOB: Well, this is crucial because a lot of people might be listening and saying, “Well, so what if the economy has slowed down for the last 50 years? We don’t know what that means.” The truth is, we know exactly what it means. The last time in this country that we had an economy that expanded at a lesser rate than a previous period in the midst of a huge stock boom was the 1920s. During that period, GNP increased 48%, but several decades earlier we had a boom with not very much going on in the stock market but the economy was really cooking at a 68% gain. So in the 1920s, you had the slower economy against an overheated stock market. That’s exactly what we’ve had this time around. But, to me, the most interesting example is Japan because it’s not ancient history, and as every economist will tell you, anything before WWII doesn’t count. Well, Japan had a “miracle” economy, or so people told us, in the 1980s. Again, the Japanese miracle was mostly a story of stock prices going wild just as we had in the United States in the ‘90s. But, what they don’t tell you, and what I had never seen mentioned, was the fact that the real growth in GDP in Japan during that crazy stock boom, from 1974 to 1989, was only 4%. From the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, it was more than double that at 9.4%. So the real growth came back in the ‘50s and ‘60s for Japan. There was lesser growth in the ‘80s, but that’s when the stock boom occurred. We show the difference in a chart right in Chapter 1. So now we have two terrific historical examples of what happens when an economy and a stock market experience exactly what we went through in the 1990s. JIM: In your book, you talk about depressions. When do depressions occur and what causes them? BOB: Well, a depression occurs when the economy contracts severely, which happens when there is a sharp decline in the demand for goods and services at current prices. We are facing exactly that sort of thing today because people can’t save, and they’re spending more than they’re making, so we know that they’re
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going to have to cut back on their spending eventually. When people are trying to pay off debts at a very high rate of interest and their income slips — and as we’ve been seeing, unemployment has been edging up to new highs with each passing quarter — they’re going to do less spending as well. So I expect to see a decline in the demand for goods and services in this country. That is going to be the beginning of a depression. JIM: During the ‘30s, as this decline in demand was experienced throughout the economy, the government came in with the New Deal and tried to establish programs that would support or uphold that demand. A lot of people are saying today that because of all the safety nets, and because the government is involved in the economy, a depression can’t happen here. How would you argue against that? BOB: I think that it’s difficult for most people to get their hands around this issue because there’s so much rhetoric that’s misleading about government efforts to do anything in the economy. A free economy is the best economy, and anything that the government does always provides a result that hurts the economy in the long run. Sometimes people think that there are short-run benefits and they can point to them. Usually, even on the short run, the only reason you can see benefits in some areas is because other areas are being hurt. Governments are always late to react, so they’re certainly not going to prevent anything. When they do react, they usually do something destructive. So none of those solutions are going to help. If you need any recent guide to tell you how much the government’s on the ball, just ask yourself, did any of these agencies tell you that Enron was about to go bankrupt? The answer is no, they haven’t got a clue, and they certainly aren’t going to know in advance what the economy is going to do on the downside. You need to protect yourself. That’s why this book is called Conquer the Crash. I want people to take their finances in their own hands and not be victims of what is already developing. PART TWO WILL APPEAR IN AN UPCOMING ISSUE OF THE ELLIOTT WAVE THEORIST
THE ELLIOTT WAVE THEORIST is published by Elliott Wave International, Inc. Mailing address: P.O. Box 1618, Gainesville, Georgia 30503, USA. Phone: 770-536-0309. All contents copyright © Elliott Wave International, Inc. 2002. Reproduction, retransmission or redistribution in any form is illegal and strictly forbidden, as is continuous and regular dissemination of specific forecasts or strategies. Otherwise, feel free to quote, cite or review if full credit is given. EWT is published irregularly, one or more times per month. All contents are written by Robert Prechter. Correspondence is welcome, but volume of mail often precludes a reply. For best results, send concise e-mail to one of the addresses listed on the bulletin board of our web site (www.elliottwave.com). SUBSCRIPTION RATES: $20 per month (add $1.50 per month for overseas airmail). Subscriptions paid via credit card automatically renew each month. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express accepted; call our office for other payment options. Delivery available via internet download, email, first class mail and fax, (Call for fax pricing.) Telephone 770-536-0309 or 800-336-1618, or send credit card number and expiration date with your order. Georgia residents must add sales tax. We offer monthly and 3-time-a-week commentary on U.S. stocks, bonds, metals and the dollar in The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast; daily and monthly commentary on futures in Futures Junctures; and monthly commentary on all the world’s major markets in Global Market Perspective. Rates vary by market and frequency. For information, call us at 770-536-0309 or (within the U.S.) 800-336-1618. Or better yet, visit our website for special deals at www.elliottwave.com. For institutions, we also deliver intraday coverage of all major interest rate, stock, cash and commodities markets around the world. If your financial institution would benefit from this coverage, call us at 770-534-6680 or (within the U.S.) 800-472-9283. Or visit our institutional website at www.elliottwave.net. Send for our FREE CATALOG listing Elliott Wave BOOKS, AUDIO TAPES, SPECIAL REPORTS, PRECISION RATIO COMPASS, and our EDUCATIONAL VIDEO SERIES. Also, ask about our classroom style Basic Workshop and Advanced Tutorial on the Wave Principle, as well as our periodic International Elliott Wave Conference. The Elliott Wave Principle is a detailed description of how markets behave. The description reveals that mass investor psychology swings from pessimism to optimism and back in a natural sequence, creating specific patterns in price movement. Each pattern has implications regarding the position of the market within its overall progression, past, present and future. The purpose of this publication and its associated services is to outline the progress of markets in terms of the Elliott Wave Principle and to educate interested parties in the successful application of the Elliott Wave Principle. While a reasonable course of conduct regarding investments may be formulated from such application, at no time will specific security recommendations or customized actionable advice be given, and at no time may a reader or caller be justified in inferring that any such advice is intended. Readers must be advised that while the information herein is expressed in good faith, it is not guaranteed. Be advised that the market service that never makes mistakes does not exist. Long term success in the market demands a recognition of the fact that error and uncertainty are part of any effort to assess future probabilities.
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