To win, you must accept the fact that losses are part of the game.

April 14, 2010

By Editorial Staff

In 1984, Elliott Wave International’s founder and president Robert Prechter won the U.S. Trading Championship, setting a new all-time profit record of 444.4% in a monitored real-money options account in 4 months. In the average 4-month contest, over 75% of contestants, mostly professionals, fail to report profits.

In November 1986, in his monthly Elliott Wave Theorist Prechter published a Special Report titled, “What A Trader Really Needs To Be Successful” and gave 5 important tips to would-be market speculators. You can read them now, free (details below) — but here’s Bob’s fourth point:

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By Elliott Wave International

Let’s begin with a paradox: The one constant in our society is dramatic change. This is the main reason why projecting present conditions into the future often fails.

“If someone had asked you in 1972 to project the future of China, would anyone have said, in a single generation, they will be more productive than the United States and be a highly capitalist country?

“Project the U.S. space program in 1969, in fact many people did — there are plenty of papers you can read from 1969 to 1970 saying, well, it’s obvious at this pace we’ll both have colonies on the Moon very soon and we’ll have men on Mars…

“One could just as well ask someone to project, say, the Roman stock market in 100 A.D. I doubt if you’d have found anyone who said, well, it’s essentially going to go to zero.”

– Robert Prechter at the London School of Economics, lecture “Toward a New Science of Social Prediction.”

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