The Wave Principle is a detailed description of how groups of people behave. It reveals that mass psychology swings from pessimism to optimism and back in a natural sequence, creating specific and measurable patterns.

One of the easiest places to see this phenomenon at work is in the financial markets, where changing investor psychology is recorded in the form of price movements. If you can identify repeating patterns in prices, and figure out where in those repeating patterns we are today, then you can predict where we are going in the future.

The Elliott Wave Principle is named for its discoverer, Ralph Nelson Elliott. Mr. Elliott completed the bulk of his work on the Principle in the 1930s and 1940s.

Elliott wave analysis measures investor psychology, which is the real engine behind markets. When people are optimistic about the future of a given issue, they bid the price up.

Two observations will help you grasp this: First, for hundreds of years, investors have noticed that events external to the market seem to have no consistent effect on the market’s progress. The same news that today seems to drive the market up is just as likely to drive it down tomorrow. The only reasonable conclusion is that the markets simply do not react consistently to outside events. Second, when you study historical charts, you see that the markets continuously unfold in waves

Bob Prechter, EWI founder and President, has called the Wave Principle “the purest form of technical analysis”. He explains, “The Wave Principle is a catalog of the ways that the crowd goes from the extreme point of pessimism at the bottom to the extreme point of optimism at the top. It is a description of the steps human beings go through when they are part of the investment crowd, to change their psychological orientation from bullish to bearish. Since people don’t change much, the path they follow in moving from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism and back again tends to be the same over and over, regardless of news and extraneous events.” 

The practical goal of any analytical method is to identify market lows suitable for buying (or covering shorts), and market highs suitable for selling (or selling short). The Elliott Wave Principle is especially well suited to these functions. Nevertheless, the Wave Principle does not provide certainty about any one market outcome; rather, it provides an objective means of assessing the relative probabilities of possible future paths for the market.

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