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FEELER, THINKER, HEDGEHOG, FOX - ON PREDICTIONS

'We're on the verge of the biggest bear market in 300 years.' This was the opinion of the famous financial analyst, Robert Prechter, in an interview in The New York Times in summer 2010. A 'bear market' is a stock market with falling prices. In other words, Prechter was expecting a colossal downturn with depreciation of 'more than 90%'. This was not the first time he had predicted a disaster. Just one year previously, in June 2009, he had forecast a sharp fall; while in 2011, once again he predicted that 'the bear market is not over'. The markets would fall, fall, and fall again! Each time, his predictions spread like wildfire. The only problem for the people that listened was that the markets actually went up, up, and up again.

In fact, this is what stock markets generally do. For example, in 100 years US shares rose by an average of 7% per year - in addition to inflation, which, with compound interest, would have increased a passive stock investor's purchasing power by approximately 80 000%. Up, up, up!

On account of his endless doomsday forecasts, Prechter has often been described as the biggest 'bear' on Wall Street. That is Wall Street slang for a person who thinks that the markets are heading down. How exactly did he arrive at his predictions? Well, he used the so-called 'Elliot Wave Theory'. He also claimed that he has never seen a market evolve in anything other than an Elliot Wave pattern.

I will not bore you here with the principles of Elliot Wave. However, despite my persistent quest, I have never been able to find a theory for why it is supposed to work. Not even in Prechter's own writings, where he merely refers to it as 'magical'. That makes it a bit odd that a leading newspaper such as The New York Times published his advice in 2009, 2010, and 2011, not to mention on many occasions both before and since. Doubly odd, because, according to the Hulbert Financial Digest, if an investor had systematically followed Prechter's recommendations from 1985 to 2010, they would have lost 98.3%. To put things into perspective, if that same investor had invested in a fund that passively followed the stock market index, and then had not touched his or her portfolio during the same 25 years, instead there would have been a gain of 857%. It seems to me that Robert Prechter is a man with a great idea, which is simply not substantiated by anything whatsoever.

Are you a feeler or a thinker?

When we hear the story of Prechter, the expression 'fact-resistance' springs to mind. Fact-resistance is a slang expression, but applies to a scientifically recognised type who crops up, for instance, in the much-used Myers-Briggs personality test. The test distinguishes between 'feeling' and 'thinking' personality types: in other words, people who are overwhelmingly 'emotional' rather than overwhelmingly 'analytical'. So, according to Myers-Briggs, what is a 'feeler'? A person who recognises him or herself in many of the following statements:

• 'I have a people or communications orientation.'
• 'I am concerned with harmony and nervous when it is missing.'
• 'I look for what is important to others and express concern for others.'
• 'I make decisions with my heart and want to be compassionate.'
• 'I believe being tactful is more important than telling the "cold truth".'
• 'Sometimes I miss seeing or communicating the "hard truth" of situations.'
• 'I am sometimes experienced by others as too idealistic, mushy, or indirect.'

Feelers are empathetic, concerned with a civil tone in debate and with following consensus, while cold facts and dry statistics mean less to them. They react strongly to emotional stories or what science rather drily calls 'anecdotal evidence'. In life, they mainly do what immediately feels right and good, and they set great store by other people's points of view, on the basis of whether they deem these people to be good or not. Try having a discussion with a strong feeler. He or she will often relate more to you as a person than to your arguments. Given that the Myers-Briggs test is particularly widespread, it is possible to quantify how the population is divided, and international studies have shown that approximately 44% of men and 76% of women are predominantly feelers. If we take the population as a whole, approximately 60% are primarily feelers.

According to the Myers-Briggs measurements, the remainder - in other words, 40% of everyone, and 56% of men and 24% of women - are predominantly thinkers. They can generally respond affirmatively to the following statements:

• 'I enjoy technical and scientific fields where logic is important.'
• 'I notice inconsistencies.'
• 'I look for logical explanations or solutions to almost everything.'
• 'I make decisions with my head and want to be fair.'
• 'I believe telling the truth is more important than being tactful.'
• 'Sometimes I miss or don't value the "people" part of a situation.'
• 'I can come across as too task-oriented, uncaring, or indifferent.'

Thinkers are most likely to make decisions on the basis of technology, science, and logic. They prioritise what data tells them, and are less concerned about opposing consensus or offending other people by acting accordingly. In a debate, it is logic rather than tone that counts. If logic conflicts with consensus, they usually follow it anyway.

My guess is that Prechter is predominantly a feeler, because for decades he has behaved in a somewhat fact-resistant way. The same applies to the renowned environmental activist, Paul R. Ehrlich, who in the course of a lengthy career has postulated an endless array of abortive doomsday predictions about the world's environment and resources. For example, in the 1960s, Ehrlich could not imagine that India would be able to feed 200 million people in 1980. However, today there are 1.2 billion Indians, and they are much better nourished than back then. In his book The Population Bomb (1968), he further stated that global population growth would be curbed by disease, war, and famine. The following year, he said of the United Kingdom: 'If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.' He thought that the country was so over-populated that it could collapse completely as a result of pollution and lack of resources. This did not happen and, in my opinion, the UK culinary offering has improved a great deal since he wrote the book, and both its air and its water are cleaner.

And so it went on. He frequently made dramatic predictions about global famine, and added that even the United States, for all its wealth, would not be spared famine. In fact, he predicted, in great detail, that 65 million Americans would suffer starvation in the 1980s, and that by 1999 the population of the United States would be reduced to 22.6 million. Despite the fact that it actually increased to 273 million, and that obesity became a growing problem, he did not retract his views. The world was running out of resources. No dispute! In his book The End of Affluence (1975), he went on to predict that, 'before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity', in which 'the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be nearing depletion'. Today, about four decades later, we have not run out of any of the minerals he was concerned about. But this has not affected his attitudes either.

Ehrlich also believed that the world was running out of life. In 1993, he estimated that half of Earth's animal species would disappear in the next seven years, and that all of them (yes, every single one) would have disappeared by 2015. Nonetheless, there is still life on the planet (I just saw a bird flying by), and the scientific consensus is that approximately a total of one thousandth of all species became extinct over the past 400 or so years. That is why we probably still have 7.4-10 million species plus bacteria etc.

Popular poppycock

While these might seem like bizarre stories, there is worse to come. Because, despite their endless succession of misjudgements, both 'Wave Robert' and 'Honest Paul' have lived the lives of veritable rock stars. Prechter has featured constantly in the media and is regularly referred to as a leading financial analyst, while Ehrlich has received so many official honours that a simple list would fill a few pages of A4. For example, he has won awards from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which is involved in nominating candidates for Nobel Prizes), Volvo, the United Nations, the Albert Einstein Club, the Ecological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the Royal Society of London. Not, we must assume, because his analyses happened to be scientifically substantiated and correct, but because many people regarded him as a good, well-intentioned person. He apparently felt good in these circles.

But what did all those gentlemen think about the fact that they were...