Stock Market Turning Points:

Divorce yourself from the crowd. Independence is good.

In the play “The Secret to Freedom,” Pulitzer prize writer Archibald MacLeish had a character say this:

The only thing about a man that is a man is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

MacLeish knew how to state the truth plainly.

And the truth is, you can use your mind in any way you wish.

When it comes to financial markets, most allow others to do their thinking for them. You’ve heard the phrase “the blind following the blind.” Yes, they both fall into the ditch.

At Elliott Wave International, our mission is to keep our subscribers out of the ditch. To do so, we must first do our own financial thinking before offering our conclusions to subscribers.

Robert Prechter found it easier to think independently by being physically removed from Wall Street. In this excerpt from the book Prechter’s Perspective, Prechter was responding to an interviewer who asked about Prechter living 60 miles north of Atlanta:

It’s an advantage in my opinion to be away from the storm of mass psychology that exists in the financial centers. I have purposely distanced myself from New York to avoid the overload of superfluous information that you are exposed to there. I am an observer of crowd behavior. I think it is extremely difficult to shield yourself from the crowd’s influence when you are part of it.

Now, we don’t advocate contrarianism for its own sake. That would be just as big a mistake as letting the Wall Street crowd do your thinking for you.

That said, our financial analysis is born of deliberate independence.

Granted, the crowd might be right for a time, but generally not for long, and never at important turning points.

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