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Andy:
>Everything he has written is subject to perr review and if he had
>plagiarized anything, he would have been caught and subject to more
>scathing attack than this.
Prechter sez:
"In the latter 1980s, James Gleick made Mandelbrot famous in a glowing
New York Times article and his national best selling book, Chaos. Gleick,an
unabashed fan, was nevertheless compelled to include this frank discussion
of what fellow scientists saw as a chronic and disturbing propensity of
Mandelbrot's:
Mandelbrot['s].book.rings with the first person: "I claim.
I conceived and developed....and implemented....I have confirmed.
I show....I coined.." Wherever chaos led, Mandelbrot had some basis
to claim that he had been there first.. Even an admirer
would cry with exasperation, "Mandelbrot didn't
have everybody's thoughts before they did."
>The fact that his graph in Scientific American resembles
>an Elliot Wave is conincidental, not deliberate.
Actually, I think there were five different charts that were
similar in form and content to Elliott's originals. They weren't
just "Elliott Waves," they look a lot like the actual originals drawn
by Elliott.
>If you've read his writings, you'll realized that he has not plagiarized
>anything.
Prechter's 1999 paper acknowledges Mandelbrots article has value,
but he also clearly and decisively shows Mandelbrot knowingly and
consistently borrowed from Elliott without giving ANY credit.
>If you read his writings, you'll find out that price distribution is scale
>invariant, meaning that a 5 min chart has the same distribution >as a daily
>or even monthly chart.
Although Elliott may not have known what a "fractal" was in the 1930's,
the concept was at the core of his work. Elliott was the first to "describe
the multifractal self-affinity of market patterns" in no uncertain terms.
The fact that he didn't stop there shouldn't diminish that original thought.
>the distribution is
>Levy-Pareto, not Gaussian, which means that prices will concentrate
>together in these big moves we've seen lately (fat tail ends.).
"Allowing for differences in terminology, there is
nothing [above] that writers about the Wave Principle have not
already said..."
A bit more from Prechter:
"Although Mandelbrot's words (and lack thereof) imply that in the scientific
world, Elliott is a nonentity,
this is not the case. Physicist Didier Sornette of the Department of Earth
and Space Science and the Institute of
Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at Los
Angeles, who has been systematically conducting pioneering studies in the
fractal nature of markets, along with colleagues Johansen and Bouchaud
stated the following three years ago in their 1996 study, "Stock Market
Crashes, Precursors and Replicas," which
appeared in France's Journal de Physique: It is intriguing that the
log-periodic structures documented here bear some similarity with the
"Elliott waves" of technical analysis [citation Elliott Wave Principle by
Frost and Prechter].. A lot of effort has been developed
in finance both by academic and trading institutions and more recently by
physicists (using some of their
statistical tools developed to deal with complex times series) to analyze
past data to get information on the future.
The "Elliott wave" technique is probably the most famous in this field. We
speculate that the "Elliott waves" could
be a signature of an underlying critical structure of the stock market.
As honorable scientists should, Sornette et al. cite a proper reference
source in this and several other studies.
This is how Mandelbrot phrases his only mention that any other knowledge
preceded his "new modeling technique":
"this concept is not a rootless abstraction but a theoretical reformulation
of a down-to-earth bit of market folklore - namely, that movements of a
stock or currency all look alike when a market chart is
enlarged or reduced so that it fits the same time and price scale."
Sheesh! Sixty years of documented real time Elliott market success and
failure are just "market folklore?!"
All that said, although Elliott Wave "Theory" may be objective, but IMHO,
Elliott Wave application is subjective. There are almost always "alternate
counts," which may produce very different
outcomes, and even the best are flat out wrong sometimes. Witness Prechter's
near perfect calls from 1977 through the 1987 crash (he called that top
several weeks in advance against a backdrop of overwhelming bullish
sentiment and had posted a cycle low to within one day months before the
crash). Then from 1987 until the 2000 top he had been an "early" bear
(several fine short term calls not withstanding). Hey, but at least he
tried; Mandelbrot may be a great scientist, but has he ever called the
market or made a trade?
BW
>From: "--" <andy@xxxxxxxxxx>
>To: <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: chaos theory
>Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 09:36:06 -0400
>
>: Prechter is brilliant, a true scientist
>
>Bullshit. What writings have he made subject to peer review? What
>scientific
>dicoveries has he made?
>
>: and a non-conformist
>
>Perhaps.
>
>: who has
>: the courage to put his convictions on the line. Mandelbrot is a
>: desperate plagiarist attempting to rationalize his misdeed.
>
>More bullshit. You've made an accusation that he's a plagiarist. Prove it.
>
>If you've read his writings, you'll realized that he has not plagiarized
>anything. Everything he has written is subject to perr review and if he had
>plagiarized anything, he would have been caught and subject to more
>scathing
>attack than this. The fact that his graph in Scientific American resembles
>an Elliot Wave is conincidental, not deliberate.
>
>If you read his writings, you'll find out that price distribution is scale
>invariant, meaning that a 5 min chart has the same distribution as a daily
>or even monthly chart. You'll also find out that the distribution is
>Levy-Pareto, not Gaussian, which means that prices will concentrate
>together
>in these big moves we've seen lately (fat tail ends.).
>
>If you care to post from ignorance, so be it. But you cannot attack
>Mandelbrot with these baseless accuasations and get away with it.
>
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