Q&A With Robert Prechter: Why Technical Analysis Beats Out Fundamental Analysis
October 5, 2009

By Elliott Wave International

As the major stock markets turned down in late 2007 and then started to rally in March 2009, many people who believed in fundamental analysis have begun to question its validity.

Famed technical analyst and Elliott wave expert Robert Prechter has long called for the bear market we are now in the midst of. (He views the rally of 2009 to be a bear-market rally not the beginning of a new bull market.) But over the years, his methods of technical analysis have been criticized. Here are his most succinct arguments as to why wave analysis outdoes competing forms of analysis.

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Excerpted from Prechter’s Perspective, re-issued 2004

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Dear reader,

Today more and more investors are warming to the fact that psychology moves markets and therefore fundamental analysis, which fails to properly measure mass investor psychology, must be flawed.

Who can blame them? After all, fundamental analysis — based on past company earnings, rating agency projections and the like — proved to be of little value during the bust.

There is a better way …….

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By Elliott Wave International

It’s one of the first rules in the book of mainstream economic wisdom: a country’s economy is the thermometer which “reads” its stock market’s temperature. If financial conditions are heating up, stocks rise; if they are cooling down, stocks fall. Were it so simple — millionaires wouldn’t make up a measly .15% of the global population.

Obviously, there’s a major flaw with this logic; namely, it isn’t true. Time and again, stock prices smolder to near boiling even as economic growth chills to the bone. (The opposite also holds: Stock prices cool down even as the economy is on fire.)

Take, for instance, Germany’s main stock index, the DAX 30. On August 13, Europe’s number one economy reported a .3% rise in gross domestic product (GDP) — Germany’s first quarter of growth since January 2008. Soon after, the DAX began to rally and finished the day at a fresh, ten-month high.

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