Herzlich willkommen zu einem weiteren Sonderpodcast, featuret bei Handelsblatt im Rahmen der Foundation for the Study of Cycles. Wir haben heute im Gespräch Elliot Praktor, dessen Vater die Elliot-Wellen-Theorie weltweit bekannt gemacht hat. Das Interview ist auf Englisch. Wer Untertitel haben möchte, findet den gleichen Beitrag bei mir auf YouTube.

Wir sind bei der Foundation for the Study of Cycles, einer Zyklenkonferenz in New York, und wir treffen Elliot Prachter. Wer an der Wall Street arbeitet oder an den globalen Kapitalmärkten, der kennt die Elliot-Wellen-Theorie, die schon in den 1930er-Jahren entwickelt wurde. Robert Prachter, der Vater von Elliot, hat diese Art der Analyse groß gemacht. Elliot selber fokussiert sich heute auf den Aspekt der Software und der künstlichen Intelligenz, Also diese Elliott-Wave-Theorie praktisch nutzbarer zu machen. Was sagt die Elliott-Wave-Theorie über kollektive Psychologie? Und wie können Anleger vermeiden, an wichtigen Wendepunkten ein Teil der Herde zu sein? If someone would be new to that kind of analysis, how would you describe Elliott Wave in simple sentences? Well, okay, I think the simplest way to understand it is it's a description of the price pattern patterns that unfold over and over again in financial markets. So, Elliott Wave Theory is really the study of these price patterns. So, you could imagine that understanding the way these patterns behave might be of use to you if you're a trader or an investor. Let's look back to the early 1930s when the Elliott Wave Theory was developed for his time. How did the connection happen between your father and the person that originally developed.

Well, the person who originally developed the Elliott Wave Theory was R.N. Elliott, Ralph Nelson Elliott, and he was an accountant. And he actually became ill and was bedridden for a long period of time. And during that time, he spent hours and hours every day poring over market charts, and he kept noticing these recurring patterns in price and time. Um, my father, when he came across the Elite Wave Theory, believe it or not, the only way at that time, which was, I believe that was in the 70s, to, um, read about the theory was on microfilm, because they didn't even have full books. So the information about it that R.N. Eliot had written about was almost lost to history. And of course he had prints created from the microfilm and of course popularized it a lot during the 80s. So we almost didn't recover this theory. When did Elliot Wave Theory really blow up? I mean everybody on Wall Street knows Elliot Wave Theory. Ja, die heyday, wenn es derzeit war, war in den 1980s.

Mein Vater hatte eine Reparatur von der 20s, gerade in den 70s und 80s, die, of course, gegen den Konsensus, die das war, was mostly doom und gloom, die ist komplett understandable wenn du interest rates an 18% und einfach sehr scary runaway inflation. Ich denke, das war die worst, ich denke, das ist die worst inflationary period in US history, aside from maybe the continental, ich glaube.

So, you talked about your father making that public as a book and then going into this period where it gets known everywhere. How do you feel now, a generation after that, taking that forward? Or how has your father convinced you that you should continue that road? The thing that really caught my attention was the crash of 2008. And that was when it just struck me that financial analysis has a big impact. Und für mich war es nicht nur ein Portfolio oder Numbers oder sogar über meine eigenen Investoren. Es war mehr ein visceral Gefühl, wow, diese Cycles in der Markt, sie affect Menschen in einem sehr dramatisch. Und ich konnte es, wie ich es zu arbeiten. Menschen werden alle depressed sitzen in ihren offices in 2008. Und ich denke, ich bin 4X, die Banken sind. Ich liebe das, aber ich werde nicht sagen, dass jemanden über das, was nicht passiert. Das war ein großer Huck für mich. Oh, das ist sinnvoll. Wie hat die Technologie verändert.

Die Funktionale von Elliot Wave? Or are there no big changes compared to the 70s or 80s? We've found that the behavior of Elliott Waves really hasn't changed in spite of the technology. Markets, despite all the technology, there's still a human being behind that's calling the shots. Even if you have, say, a fully quantitative model that's automated, at the end of the day there's still a person who developed the model, A person who is still running or deciding when to stop the model, if they don't like the results. So it's still, I think humans are still the drivers of what happens in the market. And I think Elliott Wave is a reflection of that psychology. Are there differences between applying Elliott Wave theory on equities, bonds, currencies, cryptocurrencies? Yeah.

There are some differences with the e-Wave software in particular that I developed. I treat all markets the same, actually. But there are definitely differences. And one example that I gave earlier today was that in commodity markets, you tend to get these large fifth-wave blow-off moves more often than you get in, say, equities. So we do know that there are some differences.

So these days we have the computer power to detect patterns, as you introduced, Elliot waves are patterns in price structure. So, and I think a challenge always was with Elliot waves, someone needs to sit in front of a price chart and make a decision where to put this pattern. And it's always easy to see a pattern after the fact. And I think you are now pushing this into a kind of computer automated supported way, which is, I think, another big step which is required because every Elliott Wave analyst might come up with a different count. So how do you see that and what is E-Wave maybe solving in that context? If you used computers back in the 80s, you might have some idea that they didn't have a lot of horsepower behind them. And it actually takes a tremendous amount of computing power to do these Elliott Wave analysis, even today. Und ich habe eine wirklich super-supende Computer, die ich für es benutze, und dann ist es viel schneller als ich möchte. Es gibt vieles Computing-Power, das ist notwendig.

So I would say it wasn't until more recently that we really had the power we needed to be able to run the program well. And of course, what I've been doing is I rewrote the entire thing and modernized it, you know, and kind of brought it up into the modern era, so to speak. And so that's the E-Wave's origin story. But I think you have included a way to find, isolate, and detect counts and wave patterns right now. So you don't need to do it manually. So E-Wave is doing that for you, right? Yes. I mean, E-Wave does do the wave count. It's an automated process. So you don't have to sit there by hand and sketch out the wave pattern, which, like you said earlier, can be very tricky because when you're looking at a chart, Du hast die Partial-Pattern meistens der Zeit. Das ist deshalb, in meiner Präsentation, ich wollte Ihnen das Beispiel.

Wo wir die Markt coilen, und es war ein Triangle. Wir werden die Triangle aus dem Triangle, das ist ein Common-Pattern. Und die Markt hat das gleiche. Because that was actually part of a partial pattern. It was not a finished triangle. It was part of yet another pattern. So there's all these kind of very tricky situations you get into with partial patterns. So it's been quite a challenge to develop the program to deal with the inherent partialness of the data we're working with. But that's why the program does a lot of extrapolation work, like I showed, where it can try to complete the pattern in its head. So it's always kind of imagining, okay, if this is a partially formed pattern, where might the market go next and what would that look like? Does it remove this subjective decision-making of the analyst, which we had before, which made me crazy following different Elliott Wave experts.

Showing different counts? I think that cannot be the case. There are clear rules published in the book. So, why can they come up with different outcomes? Okay, so there are, of course, rules that do constrain the wave counts that are legal, as well as the wave counts that are illegal, so to speak. And that's one common baseline that all analysts should follow. I've seen many blog posts where they obviously don't know about the rules, and you get some really weird-looking counts.

But even at that basis, okay, that's a nice foundation for the Elliott Wave Theory. But then there's, of course, the area where probability comes into play and guidelines come into play. And when you get to that area of the theory, where you have different alternative wave counts or different ways that are legal of labeling a chart and you're trying to pick between them, that's where you get different analysts that may disagree. Very similar to the cycles work you were talking about where you say sometimes there are cycles going in different directions and the right answer is to be neutral. So I would say it's the same with Elliot waves. So what we've done with E-Waves, of course, that a human can't do, is that instead of using guidelines, you know, I use the word guidelines because that's what we're all familiar with, but E-Waves, the program itself does not have guidelines. You know, the guidelines, so to speak, that I refer to are just part of how the model learns the behavior of the patterns, which is an automatic learning process that it does.

But we can, of course, study the resulting model and kind of see, hey, is it behaving in a way that conforms to the original guidelines that Arne Elliott wrote about? And like I said before, we've, for the most part, have found that it's in agreement with his observations. Is there any cross-checking taking place between the results of E-Waves and the official Elliott Wave International interpretation of what the markets are doing? Cross-checking? Yeah, that you compare and you see if there are differences. You know, to be honest, we've tried to have various analysts follow the same course. But if you've ever worked with analysts before, you know that they each have their own opinion. And so people do much better work when they're allowed to just use their own opinion. And they have access to e-waves and they'll refer to it. Und so I a lot of times see, oh, that's the account we're producing from the system. And they're talking about it, you know, in their work. And I love to see that. Maybe in simple terms, very often retail investors ask me, you know, looks really super interesting. Where do I actually start? How can I get a good understanding of what it actually does?

Wie würde man jemanden interessiert mit Elliot-Wave-Theorie mit Elliot-Wave-Theorie eigentlich get into it und get started? Ja, die E-Wave-Software, in meinem Fall, ist für Leute, die bereits wissen ein bisschen über Elliot-Wave-Theorie. Wenn du ein neues und du einfach mal ein bisschen zu bekommen, dann würde ich gerne gerne gehen zu Elliot-Wave.com. Und wir haben ein vieles educationales Materialien in da. We've got a lot of books. We've got a section called Waveopedia, where they explain all the core elite wave patterns and their behavior. A lot more elaborate detail than what I did today.

And then they also have a service that I like called Trader's Classroom. And that's really a very introductory service where it's really focused on education and teaching people how to do it yourself, as opposed to, say, a forecasting service or other types of services that, you know, assume you know a little bit more about it. Looking at 2026, you know, stocks are going parabolic in the semiconductor area. I mean, is there anything that, you know, that you specifically look at at the moment that makes you nervous about the market or any change in regime that is happening right now? Well, what I did say in my presentation today was we went through the wave count that eWaves is doing from 2009. Now, I only showed it through 2020, but that was enough to show you that we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, which means that I believe we've been in the final fifth wave from the 2020 lows. And, of course, this is manifested in a lot of interesting investor behavior. Like I had mentioned, the NFT craze that happened, that's been in this fifth wave. A big characteristic of fifth waves is that if you compare them, especially against wave three, so fifth waves can be quite large.

No matter how large they are, they're still the final wave in the sequence. Other than the market breadth, which is pretty weak at the moment, is there something like an asset class that usually pre-runs equities or that can give you kind of like a signal that the market overall is starting to weaken? I'm tempted to say yes, because I see that kind of thing all the time. But at the same time, with Elliott Wave Theory, I've also noticed that it's often best to treat every market independently because those kinds of correlations come at certain times and then they go at other times. Nevertheless, what I'm tempted to say here is Bitcoin is something to watch. It's moved in lockstep with the NASDAQ. So contrary to what some people say where they say, you know, it's a safe haven asset.

If you look at its behavior, you'll notice it behaves more like a risk-on asset, you know, moving fairly much, highly correlated with the NASDAQ. And so, of course, right now we have a large divergence where the NASDAQ 100 has been just skyrocketing higher. and the crypto people are not participating. Now, that divergence could be erased, of course, if Bitcoin moves higher. But if it persists, you know, maybe that's the tech version of the Dow Theory sell signal, you could say. Maybe it's the Dow Theory 2.0. What is your favorite pattern you prefer? I know we talked about the impulse pattern, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So, but there are more than that. And I think, do you have a favorite pattern? Oh, goodness. Ja, das ist eine gute Antwort. Aber ich denke, es würde wahrscheinlich die Flatt-Pattern.

Es ist die eine der Fools die meisten Menschen. Es ist die Markt um, es geht um, dann geht es um, ein ganz-neu-hier. Und es sieht so wie die continuation von einem Trend. Aber wie ich gesagt habe, wenn du sehr carefully was passiert unter der Elliott-Wave model, Es ist eine korrektive Bewegung und eine korrektive Bewegung hoch. Und dann hat der Markt einen sehr schweigen, oftmals Crash an diesem Punkt und es zieht sich alle auf den Garten. Also ich mag das, weil es der Pattern, der die meisten Schmerzen erzeugt. Also vielleicht ist es ein bisschen Schadenfreude an meinem Teil. Ich liebe die Flasche. Danke, Elio. Danke sehr. Ich freue mich, dass du Zeit hast. Danke. Und jetzt der obligatorische und barfinsichere Risikohinweis von Mr. Markus Koch.

Meine Damen und Herren, liebe Aufsichtsbehörden, ich darf Sie darauf hinweisen, dass die Inhalte in diesem Video ausschließlich der allgemeinen Information dienen, und keine Empfehlungen zum Erwerb oder der Veräußerung bestimmter Finanzinstrumente und somit keine Anlageberatung darstellen. Insbesondere können Wall Street Correspondents und der Vortragende nicht einschätzen, inwiefern die im Video gemachten Empfehlungen ihren Anlagezielen, ihrer Risikobereitschaft und Verlusttragfähigkeit entsprechen. Wer also auf Basis von Informationen in diesem Video etwaige Anlageentscheidungen trifft, trifft diese ausschließlich auf eigene Verantwortung und eigene Gefahr. Das wiederum bedeutet, dass weder Wall Street Correspondents noch der Vortragende, das ist immer noch dieser Mann hier, für Verluste haften, die sie dadurch erleiden, dass sie Anlageentscheidungen aufgrund von Informationen oder Kommentaren in diesem Video getroffen haben. Vielen Dank für die Aufmerksamkeit und weiterhin einen erfolgreichen Handelstag.