A marketing email for a particular market-timing website came across the desk a few weeks ago here at Condor Options HQ, and the copy was funny enough that we decided to look into it. Elliot Wave theory is touted by some as the holy grail of technical analysis; to others it’s a vague and subjective kind of sideshow chicanery. Its practitioners (for example, pictured at right) seem to fall all along the continuum of competence. Now, far be it from us to cast judgment on the analytical tools that someone uses to do their trading. Trading is one of the most pragmatic disciplines possible: who cares what your tools are called or what they look like, so long as they produce results, right? Heck, we trade a strategy (the iron condor) that is also the name of a LEGO toy!

But seriously:

Today’s top was a spike, on news, so our feeling is it represented the top of wave {a} of an {a}-up- {b}-down, {c}-up move for corrective wave 2-up. This afternoon’s late decline was likely the start of wave {b}-down. The alternate is that wave 2-up topped intraday.

It’s not that we don’t understand the individual words and phrases of this kind of commentary, or even what the author is trying to say. And maybe this is just pure analytic genius.

Or maybe it’s completely untradeable, unverifiable, unfalsifiable hindsight-driven smoke-and-mirrors carnival gibberish.