Transcript Discussing Glenn Neely's 1988 Forecast
Transcript Discussing Glenn Neely's 1988 Forecast
Transcript Discussing Glenn Neely's 1988 Forecast
Interviewer: Hello, this is Bud Fox. Today, it’s my privilege to have NEoWave and
Elliott Wave expert Glenn Neely here with us. Glenn, how are you doing
today?
Glenn Neely: I’m doing well. I’m excited about the 25th anniversary of my super long-
term forecast that I made right after the 1987 stock market crash. It’ll be
interesting to review that and see how things stand now and where
things are going.
Interviewer: At the time, some of the readers and listeners were not involved in
finance or trading. Would you mind providing a review of the psychology
and the market dynamics in the late 1980s?
Glenn Neely: Obviously when I made this forecast I was very new to the business. I had
been in the business for about six years. Now I’m an old timer. I’ve been
doing this for over 30 years.
At the time, before I wrote my book, I had written an article for Cycles
Magazine. It was their special Elliott Wave edition in 1988. I had
presented in that issue an extremely long-term stock market forecast. It
probably was then – and still to this day – the longest stock market
For the first 10, 15 or 20 years so far, the forecast has worked really well.
There have been some minor changes to my Wave count, but overall the
market has done exactly what I was expecting. It’s been extremely strong
and has gone way past levels people at the time thought would have
been impossible.
Remember, this was after the ’87 crash so pessimism was worse than I’d
ever seen in my 30-year career. It was even worse than after the crashes
in 2000 and 2009. There was a lot of fear in 2009 but the fear of “the
world coming to an end” in ’87 was much greater than it is now. At least
that was my experience personally.
The pessimism was everywhere. At the time, I was the only bullish stock
market forecaster, along with Don Wolanchuk, that I knew of in the
entire world. Everyone else across the board was super bearish – they
thought this was the beginning of a depression.
When I made this talk, no one was optimistic, especially in the audience.
They were all assuming that we were going into a new depression. At the
end of the talk, I announced what I thought was going to happen to the
stock market over the next 75 years. The audience just burst out
laughing, because they thought it was the most ridiculous thing they’d
ever heard in their lives.
I said at that talk that the low would never be broken for the rest of my
life. That was what caused the first outburst of laughter. It turns out that
low was never broken. I also indicated we were going to make all-time
new highs in the stock market above the 1987 top, and we’d eventually
go way beyond that, even above 10,000. That, of course, got another
laugh in the audience. People thought I was out of my mind.
There was actually even a newsletter I remember that started right after
the crash called The Down Wave Digest. I can’t remember who started it.
When I saw it, I just knew that if someone created a newsletter where
there’s only one outcome possible – the market is going down – they had
to be wrong. That’s just crazy to me.
Trading stocks is about being open to possibilities and options, not just
having a one-sided perspective! This person was locked in. Of course, that
locked-in perspective ended up ruining his newsletter.
Bud, let’s review it, look at what I was predicting and then make the leap
to a more current assessment of where things stand, what adjustments
I’ve made to the Wave count and what I think is going to happen over the
next 10, 20 or 30 years.
Interviewer: We can go through the article. Let’s look at the first page. The first page
gives us a broad framework of Elliott Wave. It talks about the Impulsive
Wave and the Corrective Wave. Would you share a little bit of that
background knowledge to the listeners and readers? What’s the
Foundation’s view of Elliott Wave in terms of psychology and the price
action?
Glenn Neely: This is obviously very simple and basic stuff just indicating that, under
Wave Theory, when a market’s moving in the direction of a trend, it’ll
move in five segments. When it’s going against a trend, it typically moves
in three segments.
Those three segments, even if they’re more than three, tend to mostly go
sideways. Five-wave impulsive patterns always have to go comfortably or
substantially up or down. You have this big move which is impulsive and
you have corrective moves which go sideways for the most part.
Moving on to the next page, I start taking this information and applying it
to the long-term stock market data which was provided to me by the
Foundation for the Study of Cycles at the time. The long-term data they
provided went back to 1789. That data carried all the way through to the
Most people misinterpreted this period. Virtually all Wave analysts who
had access to the data misinterpreted the period where the first advance,
which is marked with the words “first advance,” was considered Wave 1.
Then the period to 1860 was considered Wave 2. The peak in 1929 was
considered Wave 3. The crash in 1932 was considered Wave 4. Some
people said Wave 4 was in 1940. Then the third section was what most
people considered Wave 5.
Because of this long-term count, ever since the late 1980s and all the way
up to now, most Elliott Wave analysts have assumed we’ve been in this
fifth Wave since 1932 or 1940, at any time we would peak out this multi-
millennium advance, a 200- or 300-year advance, that’s going to be “the
end of the world” for the United States and the rest of the world, and
we’d go into a massive depression.
Based on Wave Theory, if the 1929 to 1940 period, which I think it was
actually 1949, was Wave 4, then the market should actually go back
down into that range, which means it would go down to 140. I’ve heard
some forecasts for the Dow to go down to 40, which is near the 1932 low.
You’re talking nuclear war, obviously, if that happens.
Interviewer: Actually, I guess it somewhat makes sense. If you think about the turmoil
in the 1980s with oil prices and the Cold War, what was going on
between the United States and Russia, and then you look at this chart
which is basic knowledge of Elliott Wave, any commonsense person
would see there are five Waves up. At the time, your interpretation was
very interesting and different compared to others.
The biggest problem is, if you look at the first advance, the pattern starts
off with a lot of choppy, sideways, volatile, crazy action before it actually
starts to trend toward the end. That’s not the way you would start an
impulsive pattern.
The next big problem is the correction from the peak around 20.1 all the
way to 1860 didn’t take as long as the previous advance. Under NEoWave
rules, corrections always have to take more time than impulsive patterns.
Most Elliott Wave analysts don’t stick to this rule and it’s for this reason.
Most of their Wave counts constantly have to be changed and they’re
constantly wrong. It’s a rule that can’t be broken. If you break it, you’re
going to have to revise your scenarios.
As long as you make sure your corrections always take the same amount
of time or more as your impulsive periods, you’ll have a dramatic
reduction in the amount of errors that you experience doing Wave
analysis and increase the long-term accuracy and stability of your Wave
counts.
That’s problem number one. What most people were calling Wave 2 took
less time than Wave 1. That’s not allowed under NEoWave and should
not be allowed under Wave Theory at all.
You run into the same problem for the next big advance, which most call
Wave 3, up to the high in 1929. The correction after that for Wave 4 also
That’s not possible in a third Wave. That behavior alone makes this count
impossible. I’ve been saying this for 30 years. I’ve never agreed with this
count. It’s never even been a remote possibility.
When I looked at this pattern, I realized the move from 1860 to 1929 had
to actually be a corrective rally, despite how big it was and the
implications of that. If it’s a corrective rally, then this was a far more
bullish situation than what most people were considering.
What I started to realize was that the start of the United States didn’t
occur in 1789, which is where this data began, and the progress of
humanity didn’t begin there. London and Europe had existed for
hundreds of years before then. Europe was making great progress even
in the 1600s and 1700s. That data was not present on this chart.
There was this ABC correction. Because the correction took way less time
than Wave 1, I had to make sure the correction continued despite the
new highs.
I feel comfortable that the originator of the theory had a similar Wave
count as me, at least from the data he had. He didn’t have all data I have
here. He did assume the 1929 to 1949 period was a contracting triangle.
That helped to conclude this very large corrective pattern all making up
just Wave 2. If that was Wave 2 finishing much higher than Wave 1 and
showing an incredible amount of strength, that meant the move after
had to be the biggest, fastest, largest move of all time up to that point.
If you do some measurements, you can see 1949 to 1966 was the largest,
fastest move on this chart that was actually recorded data. It’s not the
part I projected backward, but was actually part of recorded history.
Interviewer: Glenn, I think most Elliott Wave followers who only have a simple
knowledge of impulsive and corrective Waves have a hard time getting
over how in the world a corrective wave can advance that big.
Glenn Neely: Everything is relative. The size of it is irrelevant. That’s just a human
emotional reaction. In 1929, we began what easily could be qualified as a
20-year bear market. In 1835, we had what was probably also another
20-plus-year bear market. It may have even gone longer than that.
You can have very long corrective patterns that go sideways, up or down.
You can have impulsive patterns that go up and down. It’s not relevant
how big it is or how much time it takes. What’s relevant is how it is
structured.
Interviewer: Also from what we learned in Elliott Wave, Wave 2 tends to be a deep
retracement of some sort before a strong Wave 3 happened, according to
Glenn Neely: Right. What happened was the U.S. was the most incredible industrial,
money-creating machine in the history of the world from the early 1800s
to the mid-1900s. That was perfect justification.
You’re talking about human progress on a scale that’s never been seen in
10,000 years. All of a sudden you were having an incredible number of
new products being created, the industrialization of society, patents and
new technology.
It makes sense that that was all a very strong period causing an upward
slant to what would normally be a standard advance. This was being
stretched upward because of the incredible innovation taking place in a
very short period of time that had never happened in the history of the
world to that degree.
Whenever you have new technologies that are life and society changing,
that creates upward momentum in favor of the trend. That’s why this
second Wave stretched upward so much. It was preparing us for the
incredible technological revolution that began in the 1949 period with
computers just being created and eventually mass distributed in the
1980s and 1990s and the creation of the Internet.
All this stuff is what’s creating this upward slant to Wave structure and
setting the stage for an explosive stock market advance going into the
1990s, which I was predicting here, and eventually into the mid-21st
century and the 25th year.
This power we’ve experienced from 1835 to 1949 then transferred into
the future market advance, which got us from 148 to 1,000 in just a
matter of about 20 years. That was almost a 10 times increase in 20
years.
Then we went sideways for a while. Then computers came on the scene.
Then the market took off again from 1,000. I can’t remember the peak.
Was it 2,500 or 2,600 in the Dow? Then we went through the crash of
1987. Then we went way up above 10,000. Now we’ve recently reached
15,000.
On this chart, we’d be up well above the 8,000 range. I’m not sure exactly
where it would be on the chart, but it would be significantly higher. This
is part of all this new technology creating incredible efficiencies, increase
of business concepts and distribution of products easier, faster and
better, with better record-keeping and more.
Interviewer: I’m sure you probably will cover it later, but as an Elliott Wave follower,
I’d like to ask you a question regarding super cycle Wave 4. After what is
supposed to happen in 2020 to 2060 based on the rule of alternation,
shouldn’t we get a very severe retracement? It seems it is such an
upward slant in corrections. Wave 4 is not only supposed to take longer
and also alternating with Wave 2, but it should be a downward
retracement. Is that a fair assessment, or do you have other thoughts?
Let’s move on to the next chart. We can visually move into those long-
term scenarios with a more up-to-date chart. Let’s move onto the next
chart. In the next page, it’s titled “The Long-Term Wave Count.”
In the article, I discuss the various phases of Wave 1 going from the 1765
to 1835, Wave 2 from 1835 to 1949, Wave 3 from 1949 to 2020 and
maybe 2060. At the time I assumed we were just going to take that kind
of structure to it. That may have changed some.
Let’s look at the actual Wave count that’s presented. You can see where I
finalized Wave 1. It shows part of Wave 2, to the X Wave and the
contracting triangle to finish off the big Wave 2. By the way, that 2 Wave
took about 160% or 150% of the time of Wave 1. It did take longer than
Wave 1, not an excessive amount of time but it did take longer.
The interesting part about this count, which is very common to running
corrections, is that at the top of Wave 1 in 1835, if you take the length of
that Wave 1, take 61% of it and add it to the top of Wave 1, you get
exactly the peak in 1929. That would be a very common Fibonacci
relationship for running corrections. This is on the log scale, of course.
That helps to reinforce that it’s a good determination for a strong second
Wave that’s drifting upward in a running kind of fashion.
Once Wave 2 finishes, it applies where you get a much larger advance in
the stock market, which is what I think we’re in right now.
We still have Wave 4 to go, which is probably forming now, a fifth wave
to go which is going to bring us up to much higher highs, and then a
massive fourth wave to come later on. That will be potentially considered
the new Dark Ages, but it will be a massive fourth Wave correction
starting around 2060 or 2065.
Glenn Neely: Remember that alternation has to follow multiple different rules. It’s not
just alternating in price, time, structure and complexity. There are five
different types of alternations. With Wave 2 being excessively long,
complicated and powerful, that would indicate Wave 4 is going to be
probably quicker, deeper and more violent.
I would expect Wave 4 to take maybe half or even less of the time of
Wave 2, more like 50 years, but it could be extremely deep and scary. It
would be a really large correction, maybe 60% or 70% of Wave 3. That’s
going to be the scary part. That’s not going to happen any time soon, but
it could be very scary.
Interviewer: Right. At the same time, the scariest thing that America has experienced
is the Great Depression. In some ways, that’s a correction with being a
running Wave 2. What you’re saying is the mass of Wave 4 will be even
bigger than the Great Depression.
It will be a very big drop. I can assure you of that, but it’s a long way from
now. You don’t need to worry about that for some period of time. We
will probably start a big correction in the next six to 12 months. It could
go on for quite a while, but it won’t be on the scale of the Great
Depression.
The world peak population, which was projected at the time I was doing
this, was around 2060 and 2065. All growth in the human realm is
dependent on the human population. Whenever you have massive
population declines, you have massive reduction in growth because there
are fewer people to buy and create products.
Based on the time of Wave 1, which in this case I projected went from
around 1765 up to 1835 for about 70 years, we would want Wave 3 to
take more than 70 years. That would be about 2019 as a minimum. I gave
it another 40 years, which is typical for third Waves. If they’re going to be
large, they’ll typically be around 160% of the time of Wave 1. That also
gets us around the year 2060.
For all these reasons, that’s a good year to expect a super long-term top
in the stock market, which of course is still 47 years from now. We still
have a lot of time, but there are going to be a lot of ups and downs
before then.
Let’s move on to the next page. This shows some of the relationships that
I mentioned earlier, which is actually extremely interesting. You’ll notice
that for the length of Wave 1 if you take 61%, you get this 1929 high. It
looks like big Wave 1 and big Wave 2 are identical to small Wave 1 and
small Wave 2. You have to rally it up to 1,097 for small Wave 1.
Then there’s the sideways period, and the peak of the 1987 high is 61% of
the top above the 1966 high. This creates similarities between a smaller
timeframe and a larger timeframe, which is a very common
phenomenon.
The count has changed since 1949, but at the time this looked good. The
relationships were there. It was still bullish, even though it was bullish for
slightly different reasons now.
As it turned out, the 1987 crash low was never broken. Clearly, in my
opinion, it will never be broken for the rest of my life. The Dow Jones is
now at 15,000. This article was projecting a move in the Dow to over
100,000 by the year 2060.
You can see where that little X wave is. That X wave is the peak in 1987.
This was written right after the crash of 1987. Everything after that, the
little triangle and the advance to 8,000, the correction and advance to
100,000 higher, were all projected by me. This is what I was predicting
would happen over the next 72 years from when I wrote the article. So
far, so good.
The market has obviously gone well above 8,000, and it’s probably up in
the middle section of the next square between 59,000 and 8,000.
A lot of people, when they look at stock market progression, always think
of it in arithmetic terms. They think, “God! To go from 10,000 to 100,000,
we have to go up 10 times.” You actually don’t. All you have to do is
double about two and a half times. Then you’re there. Markets double,
on average, every 10 or 15 years. I’m not sure. Do you know? It may be
every seven years.
Glenn Neely: Yes, I think it’s about every 7, 8, 9 or 10 years that markets double in
value, on average. Of course, there’s inflation there, which helps a lot.
The government is always inflating the currency. That’s generally how it
Let me tell you, it sounded a lot more preposterous and ridiculous to say
we were going to 100,000 when we were at 1,900. I was predicting we
were going to rally 98,000 points before we dropped 300 points. That’s
one reason why they laughed me out of the room.
Glenn Neely: Clearly, it seems much more plausible now, with the Dow at 15,000.
Optimism is pretty high now. It seems a lot more believable than it did
when I wrote this article.
Interviewer: Sure. The most interesting thing is the power of compounding. A lot of
people don’t understand it. The math just doesn’t lie. You can actually do
it on the calculator, and it just doesn’t lie. It works.
Glenn Neely: It’s a lot more achievable than it sounds. If you give it enough time, it’s
remarkable what’s possible with compounding.
That’s the big picture. For anyone who’s looking at this article, if they can
just keep this long-term count handy, the only part that has changed is
the interpretation of the price action after Wave 1 in 1966.
I’ve had to make some adjustments of what’s happened since then and
where we stand because the 2000 peak produced a big correction, and of
course, the 2007 high and 2008 period created an even larger correction,
which was the largest since the Great Depression. It changed the way I’m
counting this in detail. It does not change my long-term forecast.