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发表于 2009-4-23 07:29
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Q&A With Bob Prechter（英文原文)
What is the Wave Principle?
The Wave Principle is, first and foremost, a detailed description of how markets behave. Now, there’s probably more that is not in that sentence than is in that sentence. For instance, a detailed description of how markets behave does not refer to what outside events are occurring, such as in the fields of economics, politics, or social trends. It’s strictly a study of how human beings behave collectively in the trading arena.
1、（问）波浪理论是什么?
（答）波浪理论最首要的是用于对市场行为的细致描述，因而它并不包含的内容可能比它实际涵盖的要多些。例如，对市场行为的细致描述就不涉及发生在诸如政治、经济领域以及和社会潮流有关的外部事件。波浪理论仅仅对市场交易范畴的人类群体行为进行研究。
What specifically did Elliott discover?
Elliott’s most important discovery was that the patterns that develop in the stock market occur at all degrees of trend. The larger patterns are made up of components that are themselves composed of smaller ones. The same patterns on a smaller scale combine to create any one of those patterns on a larger scale. The larger pattern will combine with several others of the same degree to create an even larger pattern and so on. He described in detail exactly what those patterns look like. He identified 13 of them. Only recently has data been available for general stock prices back to the late 1700s, and the patterns are there as well.
2、（问）艾略特有什么特别的发现？
（答）股票市场上发展的价格行进模式将在趋势的各个级别上重复出现，这是艾略特最重要的发现。较大级别波浪的各个组成部分本身就是由较小浪级的波浪所构成。小尺度的波浪汇聚而产生与它们形态相同的大尺度波浪，大尺度的波浪与同级别的其它几个波浪组合在一起又形成更大的波浪，凡此种种，不一而足。艾略特极其详尽地描述了波浪模式的类型，并定义为13种。观察最近才找到的18世纪末股票价格的全面数据，相同的波浪模式可见。
How did he label the “degrees” of trend?
Elliott began by naming a particular structure with an arbitrary label, Primary degree, a term borrowed from Dow Theory. The next larger degree he called Cycle, and the next larger Supercycle. The lower degrees he named Intermediate, Minor, and so on. We therefore have a way to refer to the degrees of trend that we are talking about.
3、（问）艾略特是如何标示波浪级别的？
（答）一开始，艾略特就借用道氏理论中‘主要趋势’这个词，把这一特殊结构自行命名为大浪，然后大一级的称为循环浪，更大的称为大循环浪，把小级别的称为中浪、小浪等等。这样，我们就有了一种提及谈论中的波浪级别的方法。
What was the biggest degree trend he talked about?
Grand Supercycle, which he guessed dated back to the founding of the United States. Since then, more detailed stock market data has confirmed that he was right. That’s not the biggest degree, though, as all waves are components of larger ones.
4、（问）艾略特谈到过的最大级别波浪是什么？
（答）是超级循环浪。他猜想自美国建国起，超级循环浪就存在。正如所有的波浪都是更大波浪的组成部分一样，超级循环浪不是最大浪级。尽管如此，从那时起，更详尽的股票市场数据已经证明了他的正确性。
You once referred to the Wave Principle as the “purest form of technical analysis.” Why?
For a hundred years, investors have noticed that events external to the market often seem to have no effect on the market’s progress. With the knowledge that the market continuously unfolds in waves that are related to each other through form and ratio, we can see why there is little connection. The market has a life of its own. It is mass psychology that is registering. Changes in feelings show up directly as price changes in the barometer known as the DJIA. 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. That description fits the movement of any market, as long as human beings are involved, rather than Martians, who may have a differently operating unconscious mind. 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 and over, regardless of news and extraneous events.
5、（问）你曾提到波浪理论是“最纯正的技术分析方式”，为何这么说？
（答）百多年来，投资者已注意到市场以外的事件似乎对市场行进常常不产生影响。我们知道市场是以波浪的形式不断展开，而各个波浪则是通过形态和比率相互联系在一起的，因此，不难理解这之间缺乏关联的原因所在。市场有它自身的生命形式。它显现出大众心里特征。当作为经济生活晴雨表的道&S226;琼斯工业股平均指数表现出股价变动时，人们情感上的变化也会显而易见。波浪理论是人们情绪由市场处于底部时极度悲观向市场顶部时极端乐观变化的一系列轨迹。波浪理论是对交易人群由牛到熊心理定位历程的刻画。这个刻画适合任何市场的运动，只要卷入其中的是人类，而不是拥有不同操作潜意识的火星人。既然人们不会有多大改变，人们情绪由极度悲观到极其乐观并且往复的变化过程就会一二再再二三地倾向于相同，不管发生怎样的新闻和外部的事件。
What is the basic path?
Very simply, Elliott recognized that movement in the direction of the one larger trend subdivides into five waves. Movement against the trend subdivides into a three-wave pattern or some variation involving several three-wave patterns. In rising markets, true bull markets, the subdivisions occur in five waves up, an up-down-up-down-up sequence. Bear markets tend to occur in three wave sequences, down-up-down. Each one of those movements has a shape and a personality. As long as you can recognize the shapes that are occurring, you have a handle on what might happen next.
6、（问）什么是基本布局？
（答）非常简单。艾略特识别出与较大级别波浪同向运动的波浪细分为5浪。逆大一级趋势运动的波浪细分为3浪模式或包含几个3浪模式的变体。在上升市—真正的牛市中，波浪分量是向上的5个浪，顺序为升-降-升-降-升。熊市中总是出现降-升-降的3浪序列。每个波浪都有各自的形状和个性。只要能识别出当前波浪的形态，就能知道接下来将可能出现什么浪（或就有把握预料接下来会发生什么。）
But the five-wave form does occur on the downside.
Yes, but only as a component of a larger three-wave pattern. The essence of the Wave Principle is that the moves in the direction of the one larger trend are five-wave structures, while moves against the one larger trend are three-wave structures. From that, you can tell what the underlying trend is and invest accordingly.
7、（问）但在下跌时5浪形式确有出现
（答）是的，但它只是大一级3浪模式的一部分。波浪理论的精髓在于与大一级波浪同向的运动是5浪结构，而逆大一级趋势的运动是3浪结构。从这一点，你就能分辨出潜在的趋势，从而能作出相应的投资。
You just go on Elliott’s description alone. Does that mean you must act without knowing what’s causing the pattern?
On the contrary, I know what is causing the patterns: human nature as it relates to a person interacting with his fellows. When you ask what outside force is “causing” the patterns, you are asking the wrong question, so you are already on the wrong path. Elliott’s description of how markets behave forces you to a conclusion about cause and effect in social events. All of the causes most people assume to be operative are not, such as the latest political speeches or the latest numbers on the economy. They are simply results of the patterns of mass human psychology.
8、（问）你仅提到了艾略特的描述。这是否意味你可能在不了解是什么导致了这种模式的情况下采取行动？
（答）恰恰相反，我了解是什么导致了这种模式：是人的本性，它与每个人都有关，人们之间相互作用。当你问到是什么外部力量导致了这个模式的时候，你的问题本身就是个错误，因此你已误入歧途。艾略特对市场行为的描述迫使你对社会事件的因果下了一个结论。所有大多数人认为在起作用的原因其实不是真正的原因，如最近的政治演讲与最新的经济数字。这些仅仅是大众心理的结果。
As simply as possible, can you explain how mood drives behavior?
Mood impels action. An increasingly positive social mood causes people to buy stocks, expand businesses, wear more colorful clothes and listen to sunnier pop music. An increasingly negative social mood causes people to sell stocks, contract businesses, wear darker clothes and listen to darker pop music. So mood precedes actions. That’s why actions do not affect mood. It’s the other way around.
9、（问）请尽可能简单地解释情绪是如何影响行为的
（答）情绪推动行为。一种越来越积极的社会情绪能让人购买股票，扩展生意，穿着更加艳丽的衣裳，聆听更阳光的流行音乐。而一种越来越消极的社会情绪会使人卖掉股票，收缩生意规模，衣着暗哑，音乐低沉。因此情绪先于行动。这就是为什么行动不影响情绪的原因。实际情形刚好相反。
Is Elliott’s a mechanical system?
Not really. What we’re dealing with here is the behavior of people. If the tools you work with measure something other than the behavior of people, you’ll be removed from the reality of what’s going on. One of the biggest failures, in terms of approaching the stock market, is to assume that the market is mechanical in the sense that outside action causes market reaction, such as the idea that the market “responds” to Fed policy or the trade balance or political decisions. Others have tried to reduce it to a sum of periodic sine waves, but always find that it cannot be done, because the market is not a time-repetitive machine in its essence.
From the standpoint of theory, market behavior is tied to a mathematical law, but it is just not the same type of law found in the physical sciences. From the standpoint of practical application, the Wave Principle is tracking a living system, which is allowed variation in its forms, in fact, infinite variation, but limited by an essential form. Whereas a rigid system with numbers, strict mechanical numbers, never works.
10、（问）艾略特理论是一种机械系统吗？
（答）不尽然。我们这里讨论的是人们的行为。如果你使用的工具测量的是别的东西，而不是人的行为，那你就会偏离正在发生的事实。与股票市场打交道时容易犯的最大错误之一，是认为外部行为会引起市场反应，如认为市场会“回应”FED政策，贸易平衡或者政治决策，从而作出这个市场是机械的的假设。其他人则试图把其归纳为一个周期性正波浪集，但常常发现并不是那样，因为这个市场究其本质并不是一个时间重复性的机器。
从理论的角度讲，市场行为遵循一个数学定律，但这与自然科学中发现的定律又不一样。从实际应用的角度讲，波浪理论是一个活的系统，它允许形式的变化，事实上，允许无限的变化，但又受限于一个基本形式。而一个拥有数字，严格机械数字的死板系统是不会起作用的。
Doesn’t infinite variation imply that anything goes?
Not at all. Trees vary infinitely, but they all look like trees, don’t they? And you can tell them apart from clouds, which also vary infinitely, and buildings as well. In fact, despite infinite variability, they are amazingly similar. The same is true of market patterns.
Does knowing Elliott guarantee profits?
Only the most trained and experienced market participants can act contrarily to their natural tendencies. I have yet to meet a man who invested or traded with a completely rational program based on reasonable probabilities without allowing his greed, his fear, his extraneous opinions or his irrelevant judgments to interfere. It is man’s emotional side, particularly his social dependency, that makes him think the way his fellows do, and when he does that, he loses money in the markets. At least using Elliott, you have a basis that makes winning possible.
Most people are more interested in how it works than why it works. Is there any one thing people need to remember to make it work for them?
The key to Elliott Wave patterns is that the market goes three steps forward for every two steps back. If you do not get scared by the two steps back, and if you are not euphorically confident after the third step forward, you’re light-years ahead of the pack. Even then, I would add that it is one easy thing to recognize that the Wave Principle governs stock prices, while it is quite another to predict the next wave, and still another to profit from the exercise. There is no substitute for experience, so that you can learn what you feel and when you feel it, with respect to market behavior.
Jack Frost has described the Wave Principle as something that has to be seen to be believed. What does he mean by that?
The principle is complicated to express in words. With the Wave Principle, you are dealing with a phenomenon that reveals itself visually. Try describing the concept and variations of “tree” in detail to someone who’s never seen one and you’ll see that it can be a complex task. Saying, “Look! There’s one,” is a lot easier. The human brain is very good at recognizing a pattern visually. If a computer must be programmed to recognize shapes in the sky, it would be difficult to teach it the difference between a cloud and bird and an airplane. Once you have that programmed, of course, a blimp floats by and the computer is in trouble. The human brain works differently, however, and is extremely efficient at pattern recognition. If you draw out the Principle, it is much more quickly grasped. Then when you compare actual market pictures with the model, you can accept the truth more readily. It is at the perceptual level that it is best presented, then, not the conceptual.
Can you really teach it?
Sure. Video is an excellent approach, for instance. A lot of people have learned how to apply it that way. Some have trouble at first, but then say “Once I saw your video tape, I understood it all.”
What are the Wave Principle’s key strengths?
Frost liked to say, “Its most striking characteristics are its generality and its accuracy.” Its generality gives market perspective most of the time, and its accuracy in pointing out changes in direction is almost unbelievable at times.
Why does the Wave Principle work so well?
Because it is 100% technical. No armchair theorizing from economics and politics is required.
What are its biggest shortcomings?
There is one main weakness, and this accounts for just about all the problems. There are eleven different patterns for corrections. When a correction starts, it is impossible to tell in advance which pattern has begun, so you do not know how it is going to unfold. Therefore, the best that you can do is apply some of Elliott’s observations as guidelines in making an intelligent guess as to what it is.
Another problem is that corrections can do what Elliott called “double” or “triple” — that is, repeat several times. Triple corrections are the largest formations possible, so at least there is a limit. These repetitions can be frustrating because they can last decades. For example, we had a 16-year sideways correction in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1966 to 1982. A.J. Frost and I thought it was over in 1974, and the market was ready for another bull wave. To be sure, most stocks rose from that point forward, but the Dow went sideways for another eight years in a doubling of the time element, which caused some frustrations before the next bull wave finally began on August 12, 1982.
It sounds like a chess game. The number of possibilities, and therefore the probabilities of success, vary at certain junctures.
Chess provides an excellent analogy. The market can do whatever it wants, except that it will always do it in an Elliott Wave structure. Similarly, your opponent can move chess pieces wherever he wants, except that he must follow basic rules. On the other side of the board, you still have a lot of hard thinking to do despite your absolute knowledge that pieces must move according to those rules.
Are there situations where the Wave Principle does not hold true?
No, it always holds true. But of course, it is one thing to say the markets will follow the Wave Principle and another thing entirely to forecast the future based on that knowledge. It is always a question of probabilities. Once you have hands-on experience with it, once you understand all the rules and guidelines, it is a lot like becoming Sherlock Holmes. There are many possible outcomes, but guidelines force you along certain paths of thinking. You finally reach a point where the evidence becomes overwhelming for a certain conclusion.
Have you ever had a case where you thought the probability of a certain outcome was high, say 90%, but the market went otherwise from your expectation? What did you do then?
Of course it happens. But you should never be wrong for long relative to the degree that you are trying to assess. One of the terrific things about the approach is that it’s price that tips you off. With other approaches, price can go a long way before the reason behind your opinion changes, if it ever does. No matter how difficult the pattern is to read sometimes, it always resolves satisfactorily into a classic pattern.
Can you illustrate how knowledge of “wave structure” comes into play when trading?
For instance, the bottom of the fourth wave, which is a pullback, cannot overlap the peak of the first rally. If it does, then it’s not a fourth wave. The fourth wave is still ahead of you, and the third wave is subdividing. Knowing this tenet can keep you out of a lot of trouble that an armchair wave counter would encounter. Another very basic tenet is that wave three is never the shortest. It is usually the longest. Wave three is the recognition stage when most people get aboard.
**** **** **** * * *
R.N. Elliott (in a letter to Charles Collins) February 19, 1935: “Waves do not make errors, but my version may be defective.”
**** **** **** * * *
But if there is always a correct pattern, and it is only a matter of seeing it, why aren’t accuracy levels higher than the 40%, 50%, 60% or even the 80% ratios of hits to misses?
First, just because R.N. Elliott discerned that the market follows rules as in a chess game doesn’t mean you can predict the market’s next move. All you can give are probabilities. But the psychological difficulties are at least an equal impediment. Hamilton Bolton once said that the hardest thing he had to learn when using Elliott was to believe what he saw. Despite all I know, I have fallen prey to that problem more than once. The fact that even perfect analysis only results in the best probability provides the uncertainty that feeds the psychological unease. As Frost is fond of saying, “The market always leaves its options open.” So when you combine human weakness with a game of probability, the result is many errors in judgment. Nevertheless, I must stress that the ratio of success with Elliott is better than that with other approaches, and that is the only rational basis for judging its value. Besides, the inestimable value of the Wave Principle is not so much that it provides a high percentage of correct “calls” on the market, but that it always gives the investor a sense of perspective.
Is it possible that the system merely takes into account every possible pattern and thus allows the practitioner to force things into a satisfactory wave count retrospectively — but not prospectively?
No, for two reasons. First, if that were true, then there would be no record of success such as the Wave Principle has over the decades. There are numerological approaches to the market, ones based on fantasy that may as well be dealing with a random walk, and they produce worthless results, as they should. As Paul Montgomery likes to say, a good test of a theory is whether it can predict. Second, there are many non-Elliott patterns that the market could trace out if it were a random walk; but it has never done it. I have never seen a market unfold in other than an Elliott Wave pattern.
Do you believe that the Wave Principle provides for an objective form of analysis? Two different people can look at the same chart and derive very different wave counts. There are market watchers who say that applying wave theory is a very subjective.
I always ask, “compared to what?” There is no group more subjective than conventional analysts who look at the same “fundamental” news event a war, the level of interest rates, the P/E ratio, GDP reports, the President’s economic policy, the Fed’s monetary policy, you name it and come up with countless opposing conclusions. They generally don’t even bother to study the data. The Wave Principle is an excellent basis for assessing probabilities regarding future market movement. Probabilities are by nature different from certainties. Some people misinterpret this aspect of analysis as subjectivity, but all probabilities may be put in order objectively according to the rules and guidelines of wave formation. We are developing a computer program to do wave analysis, and it can be done only because objective ordering is possible. Most analysts are subjective most of the time, and the rest are subjective at least some of the time. But that is their problem and sometimes my problem, too but not the Wave Principle’s.
Can short-term traders use the Wave Principle, or is it better for a longer term trading methodology?
It’s a fractal, which means that the same patterns appear at all degrees of trend.
What is important for market participants to be aware of regarding the nature of human beings and trading?
Most investors do not have extensive knowledge or experience in the area of investing, so they look to others to provide direction. They look at the tape and watch which way prices are going, they read the newspapers, they listen to financial television, they go to cocktail parties and talk to their neighbors anything other than formulating their own personal research, education and convictions. They are getting their conviction, or lack thereof, from others. The Wave Principle develops because it’s a reflection of unconscious thought patterns and not the rational faculty of human beings. People always generate mental visions of glorious worlds when a market goes up and annihilation when it goes down. The herding impulse creates trends and extremes. Once you can read Elliott waves, you can forecast probabilities for any market quite often and usually when it matters. You can also anticipate broader societal changes. If you know the signs, you can use them to your advantage.
With the advent of electronic trading, institutions can trade big blocks of stock in a few seconds, and individuals can trade and invest from their home PCs. Has electronic trading changed the nature of the markets or the marketplace? What do you think of this development?
I’ve been watching hourly trends for nearly 30 years, and as far as I can tell, electronic trading has not changed the behavior of markets one bit. Electronic trading is a good thing because it takes away the middlemen, who were either honest but no longer necessary or they were rip-off artists. Electronic trading can be a bad thing, too, in that it allows impulsive people to blow through their savings faster by clicking a mouse. On second thought, I guess it’s better to do it quickly than slowly; the pain doesn’t last as long that way, and you learn faster.
Do you believe that electronic trading has leveled the playing field between the individual investor and the institutional trader?
Unquestionably, yes. Now we individuals get an honest fill and an immediate report. Isn’t that amazing? It certainly is, compared to the old days, which means every year in history before 2000.
Throughout your career, you have developed and added to Elliott wave theory, the latest being the field of socionomics. Can you please explain more about the theoretical underpinnings of socionomics?
Because waves occur, it must be that events outside the market do not impact the market, because if they did, they would have to be perfectly patterned to produce waves. So waves must be caused by some mechanism other than events working on people’s psyches. The best explanation I have is that waves are the product of unconscious minds, which are impelled to mimic each other because of a herding impulse inherited through evolution. Social events are tied to social psychology, but because waves are endogenous the only possible relationship is that social actions are a product of waves of social psychology, not the other way around. The fact that notable social events follow rather than precede corresponding stock market waves, in my opinion, supports the socionomic hypothesis. The only other explanation for this chronology is “discounting” theory, which is both venerable and absurd. People cannot see a future that hasn’t happened yet. The only sensible explanation is that their shared waves of positive and negative emotions determine the character of subsequent social action. When you listen to and read general financial media, do so from a socionomic perspective. Don’t read what it says; see what it means.
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