What is the Elliott Wave Principle?

The Elliott Wave Principle is a detailed description of how groups of people behave. It reveals that mass psychology swings from pessimism to optimism and back in a natural sequence, creating specific and measurable patterns.

One of the easiest places to see the Elliott Wave Principle at work is in the financial markets, where changing investor psychology is recorded in the form of price movements. If you can identify repeating patterns in prices, and figure out where we are in those repeating patterns today, you can predict where we are going.

The Elliott Wave Principle is named for its discoverer, Ralph Nelson Elliott.

Elliott Wave Principle measures investor psychology, which is thereal engine behind the stock markets. When people are optimistic about the future of a given issue, they bid the price up.

Two observations will help you grasp this: First, for hundreds of years, investors have noticed that events external to the stock markets seem to have no consistent effect on the their progress. The same news that today seems to drive the markets up are as likely to drive them down tomorrow. The only reasonable conclusion is that the markets simply do not react consistently to outside events. Second, when you study historical charts, you see that the markets continuously unfold in waves.

Using the Elliott Wave Principle is an exercise in probability. An Elliottician is someone who is able to identify the markets structure and anticipate the most likely next move based on our position within those structures. By knowing the wave patterns, you’ll know what the markets are likely to do next and (sometimes most importantly) what they will not do next. By using the Elliott Wave Principle, you identify the highest probable moves with the least risk.

 

 

Market Predictions Based on Wave Patterns
Elliott made detailed stock market predictions based on unique characteristics he discovered in the wave patterns. An impulsive wave, which goes with the main trend, always shows five waves in its pattern. On a smaller scale, within each of the impulsive waves, five waves can again be found. In this smaller pattern, the same pattern repeats itself ad infinitum. These ever-smaller patterns are labeled as different wave degrees in the Elliott Wave Principle. Only much later were fractals recognized by scientists.

In the financial markets we know that "every action creates an equal and opposite reaction" as a price movement up or down must be followed by a contrary movement. Price action is divided into trends and corrections or sideways movements. Trends show the main direction of prices while corrections move against the trend. Elliott labeled these "impulsive" and "corrective" waves.

Theory Interpretation
The Elliott Wave Theory is interpreted as follows:

• Every action is followed by a reaction.
• Five waves move in the direction of the main trend followed by three corrective waves (a 5-3 move).
• A 5-3 move completes a cycle.
• This 5-3 move then becomes two subdivisions of the next higher 5-3 wave.
• The underlying 5-3 pattern remains constant, though the time span of each may vary.

Let's have a look at the following chart made up of eight waves (five up and three down) labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, A, B and C.

You can see that the three waves in the direction of the trend are impulses, so these waves also have five waves within them. The waves against the trend are corrections and are composed of three waves.

Theory Gained Popularity in the 1970s
In the 1970s, this wave principle gained popularity through the work of Frost and Prechter. They published a legendary book on the Elliott Wave entitled "The Elliott Wave Principle – The Key to Stock Market Profits". In this book, the authors predicted the bull market of the 1970s, and Robert Prechter called the crash of 1987. (For related reading, see Digging Deeper Into Bull And Bear Markets and The Greatest Market Crashes.)

The corrective wave formation normally has three distinct price movements - two in the direction of the main correction (A and C) and one against it (B). Waves 2 and 4 in the above picture are corrections. These waves have the following structure:

Note that waves A and C move in the direction of the shorter-term trend, and therefore are impulsive and composed of five waves, which are shown in the picture above.

An impulse-wave formation, followed by a corrective wave, form an Elliott wave degree consisting of trends and countertrends. Although the patterns pictured above are bullish, the same applies for bear markets where the main trend is down.

Series of Wave Categories
The Elliott Wave Theory assigns a series of categories to the waves from largest to smallest. They are:

• Grand Supercycle
• Supercycle
• Cycle
• Primary
• Intermediate
• Minor
• Minute
• Minuette
• Sub-Minuette

To use the theory in everyday trading, the trader determines the main wave, or supercycle, goes long and then sells or shorts the position as the pattern runs out of steam and a reversal is imminent.

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