Investment Cycles

This Element is an excerpt from Technical Analysis: The Complete Resource for Financial Market Technicians, Second Edition (9780137059447) by Charles D. Kirkpatrick and Julie Dahlquist. Available in print and digital formats.

Do price cycles come in waves? An objective look at the evidence–and what it means to investors.

Trends don’t occur in a straight line. Prices oscillate up and down around a trend. These oscillations form trading ranges, patterns, and channels. Could these oscillations have some sort of regularity? Believing they do, cycle analysts look at prices as a form of complex harmonics or “waves.” Not surprisingly, the concept of prices oscillating in cycles is controversial...