naturalmente in inglese la bibliografia è molto piu' vasta
ecco la biografia con qualche nota in piu'
...buona lettura
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MEGLIO DEDICARLO A LETTURE PIU' COSTRUTTIVE
Ralph Nelson Elliott
Ralph Nelson Elliott was of that rarest of breeds, a true scholar in the practical world of finance. Financial analyst Hamilton Bolton accurately described the enormity of Elliott's feat when he said that "he developed his principle into a rational method of stock market analysis on a scale never before attempted." Brilliant and persistent, Elliott reached his ultimate achievement late in life by a circuitous route that included fortune in the disguise of disaster.
Elliott was born on July 28, 1871 in Marysville, Kansas, and later moved to San Antonio, Texas. Around 1896, he entered the accounting field, and for twenty-five years held executive positions primarily with railroad companies in Mexico and Central America. By rescuing numerous companies from financial difficulty, Elliott earned a reputation as an expert business organizer. Finally, in early 1920, he moved to New York City.
Elliott’s specialty made him the perfect choice for one of the U.S. government’s international projects. In 1924, the U.S. State Department chose him to become the Chief Accountant for Nicaragua, which was under the control of the U.S. Marines at the time. In February 1925, Elliott began applying his experience in corporate reorganization to reorganizing the finances of an entire country.
When the U.S. extricated itself from Nicaragua, Elliott moved to Guatemala City to assume another corporate executive position: general auditor of the International Railway of Central America. During this time, Elliott wrote two books: Tea Room and Cafeteria Management, published in August 1926 by Little, Brown & Company, and The Future of Latin America, an analysis of the economic and social problems of Latin America and a proposal for creating economic stability and lasting prosperity in the region.
With one book sold and the second one under consideration, Elliott decided to return to the United States to set up an independent management consulting business. It was around this time that he began to feel the symptoms of an alimentary tract illness caused by the organism amoeba histolytica that he contracted Central America.
Elliott's reputation, built upon a distinguished career, his new book, and a long list of references, was soaring. Book reviews were favorable, he was in demand as a speaker, and his consulting business was beginning to grow. Just when Elliott's future appeared its brightest, however, his illness suddenly worsened. By 1929, it had developed into a debilitating case of pernicious anemia, leaving him bedridden. The adventurous and productive R.N. Elliott was forced into an unwanted retirement at the age of 58. Several times over the next five years, he came extremely close to death.
Elliott needed something to occupy his mind while recuperating between the worst attacks of his illness. It was around this time that he turned his full attention to studying the behavior of the stock market.
Investigating the possibility of form in the marketplace, Elliott examined yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and half-hourly charts of the various indexes covering 75 years of stock market behavior. In doing so, he was fulfilling a mission that he had enunciated for all responsible men in his manuscript on Latin America: "There is a reason for everything, and it is [one's] duty to try to discover it."
In May 1934, two months after his final brush with death, Elliott's observations of stock market behavior began coming together into a general set of principles that applied to all degrees of wave movement in the stock price averages.
Today's scientific term for a large part of Elliott's observation about markets is that they are "fractal," coming under the umbrella of chaos science, although he went further in actually describing the component patterns and how they linked together. The former expert organizer of businesses had uncovered, through meticulous study, the organizational principle behind the movement of markets. As he got more proficient in the application of his principles and corrected initial errors in their formulation, their accuracy began to amaze him.
By November 1934, R.N. Elliott's confidence in his ideas had developed to the point that he decided to present them to at least one member of the financial community: Charles J. Collins of Investment Counsel, Inc. in Detroit.
Collins had traditionally put off the numerous correspondents who offered him systems for beating the market by asking them to forecast the market for awhile, assuming that any truly worthwhile system would stand out when applied in current time. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these systems proved to be dismal failures. Elliott's principle, however, was another story.
The Dow Jones averages had been declining throughout early 1935, and Elliott had pinpointed hourly turns by telegram with a fair degree of accuracy. In the second week of February, the Dow Jones Rail Average, as Elliott had previously predicted, broke below its 1934 low of 33.19. Advisors were turning negative and memories of the 1929-32 crash were immediately rekindled as bearish pronouncements about the future course of the economy proliferated. The Dow Industrials had fallen about 11% and were approaching the 96 level while the Rails (a more important average then) had fallen 50% from their 1933 peak to the 27 level.
On Wednesday, March 13, 1935, just after the close of trading, with the Dow Jones averages finishing near the lows for the day, Elliott sent a telegram to Collins and flatly stated the following: "NOTWITHSTANDING BEARISH (DOW) IMPLICATIONS ALL AVERAGES ARE MAKING FINAL BOTTOM."
Collins read the telegram on the morning of the next day, Thursday, March 14, 1935, the day of the closing low for the Dow Industrials that year.
The day prior to the telegram, Tuesday, March 12, marked the 1935 closing low for the Dow Jones Rails. The thirteen month “correction” was over, and the market immediately turned to the upside.
Two months later, as the market continued on its upward climb, Collins, "impressed by [Elliott's] dogmatism and accuracy," agreed to collaborate on a book on the Wave Principle suitable for public distribution.
The Wave Principle was published on August 31, 1938. The first chapter makes the following statements:
No truth meets more general acceptance than that the universe is ruled by law. Without law, it is self-evident there would be chaos, and where chaos is, nothing is.... Very extensive research in connection with... human activities indicates that practically all developments which result from our social-economic processes follow a law that causes them to repeat themselves in similar and constantly recurring serials of waves or impulses of definite number and pattern... The stock market illustrates the wave impulse common to social-economic activity... It has its law, just as is true of other things throughout the universe.
Within weeks after the publication of his ground-breaking book, Elliott packed up his belongings and moved to an apartment hotel in Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, a short subway stop from Manhattan's financial district. On November 10, he published the first in a long series of Interpretive Letters that analyzed and forecasted the path of the stock market. Ralph Elliott was finally back in the saddle, and as independently in business as he had planned eleven years before. In early 1939, Elliott was commissioned to write twelve articles on the Wave Principle for Financial World magazine. These articles established Elliott's reputation with the investment community, and led to his publishing a series of "Educational Bulletins." One of these was a ground-breaking work that lifted the Wave Principle from a comprehensive catalog of the market's behavioral patterns to a broad theory of collective human behavior that was new to the fields of economics and sociology. By the early 1940s, Elliott had fully developed his concept that the ebb and flow of human emotions and activities follow a natural progression governed by laws of nature. He tied the patterns of collective human behavior to the Fibonacci, or "golden" ratio, a mathematical phenomenon known for millennia by mathematicians, scientists, artists, architects and philosophers as one of nature's ubiquitous laws of form and progress.
Elliott then put together what he considered his definitive work, Nature's Law -- The Secret of the Universe. This rather grandly titled monograph, which Elliott published at age 75, includes almost every thought he had concerning the theory of the Wave Principle. The book was published June 10, 1946, and the reported 1000 copies sold out quickly to various members of the New York financial community. Less than two years before his death, Elliott had finally made his mark upon history.
As a result of Elliott’s pioneering research, today, thousands of institutional portfolio managers, traders and private investors use the Wave Principle in their investment decision making. Ralph Elliott undoubtedly would be gratified to see it.
This article was excerpted from a detailed 64-page biography in R.N. Elliott’s Masterworks (New Classics Library, 1994). This book contains all of R.N. Elliott’s books and articles, plus highlights from his market letters.
