On Nov 14, 2008, at 3:42 PM, Jenny Brown wrote:
> Nick Paumgarten writes in the New Yorker, Talk of the Town:
>
> Another guest, a trader and market strategist who had voted for
> Ralph Nader, agreed about 2012, but according to a different logic.
> He expounded on a belief he held regarding the cycles of history and
> the markets. It was based, he said, on the formula for the
> circumference of a circle—the idea that 2π/r/ might apply to the
> financial cycle—and, in combination with various Fibonacci fractal
> techniques, it had made him a lot of money. You could slice up
> history into what he called pi cycles, each lasting exactly three
> thousand one hundred and forty-one days, or 8.6 years. You could
> subdivide these, by the hours on a clock, say, or the signs of the
> zodiac, and detect mini-cycles of 8.6 months. He rattled off a
> series of inflectionary dates and occurrences: the Nikkei high, in
> late 1989; the ruble collapse, in mid-1998; the historically tight
> credit spreads in early 2007. By God, he was onto something. Another
> Tusker, please. In the background, the electoral map showed that at
> some point during this dissertation Obama had taken Pennsylvania and
> Ohio.
>
> According to pi-cycle theory, after a failed attempt at a rally
> between now and next spring, the market will not hit bottom until
> June, 2011, so Obama may be doomed to muddle through a deepening
> recession and the unpopularity that comes with it, and whoever
> succeeds him in 2012, should he lose, will then have the chance to
> ride the recovery—to be, in the public’s untrained eye, the
> transformative F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan that people dearly want Obama
> to be now. Unless, of course, one adheres to the Venn-diagram view
> of history, in which case November 4, 2008, could feasibly be Day
> One in another pi cycle. Where they overlap is anyone’s guess.
This cycle stuff is truly mad. The old FNN used to be full of loons talking about the 2-day and 5-day and 7-week cycles all bottoming next Tuesday, though the 13-week cycle is still trending down, which if you apply Gann analysis to the situation and remember that Wednesday is an anniversary day, you can get an explosive rally followed by a collapse, or maybe you couldn't.