W.D. Gann was a day trader in the early 20th century. Stories swirl around about him that he was either the greatest trader of all time, or the most successful wares peddler, as he wrote dozens of books and papers that he sold countless copies of.
Everyone is after that illustrious buck, and people have turned to just about anything to try to get a leg up in Wall Street.
Through my perusing, I have been trying to discern whether or not there is much weight to Gann's methods, and I have found that there are really two answers to the question:
Gann was a freaking genius no matter how you slice it, and made a lot of money in his time.
He did well for himself selling and buying wheat and cotton futures, so I do believe there was a successful method to his madness.
Now, many people have written about Gann. Some of his strategies are widely accepted and utilized in the trading world. Gann squares for instance are a very well known strategies that traders use every day in their trading game.
I wanted to find out more about what makes him tick however, and so I went delving into this works.
The book I found most useful was the ever-famous "Tunnel Thru the Air", which is said to hold the secrets to the whole universe! (Or ya know, just how Gann was able to perform so well in the stock market.)
The first thing I noticed was that Gann LOVED to date drop. I have a bit of an advantage here because I am married to an astrologer, and I know Gann had an astrologer as an assistant, so it was pretty glaringly obvious that the dates he kept throwing around were astrologically significant. Page after page of dates, and while most of the charts I looked at differed a lot, many of them had similar characteristics, like where the sun was at the time, and different planetary aspects.
I am a planner type gal, so I took notes and kept charts with the best of them during this research period, and I decided to apply what I learned to the actual stock market and give it a go!
This last week, I correctly predicted the last 3/4 days of the stock I am invested in (Nike), and I believe I have accomplished this by using Gann's astrological methodology. The crazy part is, there is nothing particularly woo-woo about this as naysayers might think. The way he used astrology was just in recognizing patterns that happened over and over again. Just because he assigned those patterns to different planets, doesn't make them less mathematically significant.
All in all, I think Gann was a little out to lunch, but I do think he was also a brilliant man that cracked a big code in Wall Street trading. The lesson I learned from this was, there is no holy grail. There will never be a pattern or cycle that fits in perfectly and works for every scenario. Figuring all of this out is a lot of work, but it is also an exciting and rather fulfilling process.
Hope all ya'll are surviving the Rona.
xx - Beth