July 6, 2010 Prechter Calls for Dow 1,000

If you're not familiar with Mr. Prechter, he's a follower of an obscure accountant named RN Elliott who claimed to have discovered that the stock market follows a predictable pattern which is somehow (don't ask me) related to the Fibonacci Sequence.

“I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’ ” he said. “Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while.”
His advice: individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come. (For traders with a fair amount of skill and willingness to embrace risk, he suggests other alternatives, like shorting the market or making bets on volatility.) But ultimately, “the decline will lead to one of the best investment opportunities ever,” he said.

Buy-and-hold stock investors will be devastated in a crash much worse than the declines of 2008 and early 2009 or the worst years of the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873, he predicted.

For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,” he said. This time, he said, “If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.’ ”

The Dow, which now stands at 9,686.48, is likely to fall well below 1,000 over perhaps five or six years as a grand market cycle comes to an end, he said. That unraveling, combined with a depression and deflation, will make anyone holding cash “extremely grateful for their prudence.”


I believe that people make too much of incorrect forecasts. I don't expect anyone to be able to predict the future with a high degree of accuracy, but Prechter is way, way out there.

Even if the Dow started to plunge, I would bet that the companies would be nationalized before they got down to Dow 2,000. I'm guessing the Dow companies have 1,000 points worth of cash alone. There's also the most difficult questions of betting in favor of Armageddon -- if you're right, how do you collect and whom do you collect from? Mad Max??

source:crossingwallstreet