It's becoming a hazy memory for many investors, but you may still remember the unbelievable volatility we saw in the DJIA and S&P500 just eight months ago. For example, on October 9, 2008, the DJIA fell 680 points. Four days later, it zoomed 800 higher. Two days after that, that 800-point gain was completely erased. And so on.
The reason why those wild gyrations of the world's benchmark stock index were so hard to believe was because it just didn't seem rational. That came as a surprise to a lot of mainstream observers, who for decades held on to the belief that the financial markets are "rational and efficient." Here's an excerpt from the October 7 New York Times article titled, "Forget Logic; Fear Appears to Have Edge" (emphasis added):
"Anybody searching for cause-and-effect logic in the daily gyrations of the market will be disappointed... the market has become a case study in the psychology of crowds, many experts say. During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, it seemed everybody and their grandmothers were piling into stocks. Now they are bailing out.
"Fear is an immensely powerful force… Scientists who have studied the brain function have found that the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls fear, responds faster than the parts of the brain that handle cognitive functions."
And now, another quote – this one from a 1999 book "The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior…" by Robert Prechter, EWI's founder and CEO. See how well if it explains "the psychology of crowds" and confirms what many mainstream financial analysts were just discovering last fall (emphasis added):
"The primitive [human] brain stem, called the basal ganglia, which we share with animal forms as low as reptiles, controls impulses essential to survival. The limbic system, which we share with mammals, controls emotions. The neocortex, which is significantly developed only in humans, is the seat of reason. Thus, we actually have three connected minds: primal, emotional and rational."
"The emotional brain can be triggered by a walnut-sized structure called the amygdala. If the amygdala senses a threat, it reacts instantaneously, signaling crisis and setting off emotional alarms in the limbic system. In an emotionally charged situation, the limbic system usually wins.
"As a primitive tool of survival, emotional impulses from the limbic system impel a desire among individuals to seek signals from others in matters of knowledge and behavior and therefore to align their feelings and convictions with those of the group. The desire to belong to and be accepted by the group is particularly powerful in intensely emotional social settings, when it can overwhelm the higher brain functions.
"In a realm such as investing, where so few are knowledgeable…the tendency toward dependence is pervasive. Trends…are steered not by the rational decisions of individual minds but by the peculiar collective sensibilities of the herd. Wall Street certainly shares aspects of a crowd… Most people get virtually all of their ideas about financial markets from other people, through newspapers, television, tipsters and analysts, without checking a thing. This dependence is nearly universal, even among long-term investors... [who] .... are driven to follow the herd because they do not have firsthand knowledge adequate to form an independent conviction, which makes them seek wisdom in numbers. The unconscious says: You have too little basis upon which to exercise reason; your only alternative is to assume that the herd knows where it’s going.
"This fact relates directly to the behavior of financial market participants, who can be flushed with confidence one day and in a state of utter panic the next. It is an advantage to survival…to avoid rejection by revealing your sameness. Pressure from, and influence by, peers, then, is at least one reason why most people cannot bring themselves to change from a bullish to bearish orientation or vice versa if to do so would go against the ideas of their associates. It also explains why a market or other social trend can continue for a long, long time and why financial valuations can become so extreme as to appear outrageous…"
Doesn't this quote explain perfectly well the boom-and-bust cycle -- in stocks, commodities and real estate -- that we've been witnessing since the dot.com bubble?
And here's what's also very interesting: Human collective herding impulses are not random. They develop in Elliott wave patterns, which makes herding predictable. More from Prechter's "Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior…":
"When the unconscious mind operates, it could hardly do so randomly, as that would mean no thought at all. It must operate in patterns peculiar to it. This is clearly the case in individuals, whose limbic systems produce the same patterns of behavior over and over. A person’s patterned psychological dynamics, as they relate to the social environment, produce an unconscious impulse to herd, which in combination with like minds produces global patterns of interactive dynamics in a shared social setting.
"When a herd 'thinks,' the result is not reason but an emotional interpersonal dynamic that must be the source of [Elliott] waves. The resulting pattern of collective conduct apparently takes the form of the Wave Principle."
The markets' "irrational" volatility comes as no surprise to the students of crowd psychology and the Elliott Wave Principle. Going forward, this knowledge will certainly come in handy again. This last quote from Fastcompany.com explains why (emphasis added):
"…president of a New York-based executive placement firm…says he received a phone call on Monday morning from a hedge fund that fired an entire trading desk, and asked his firm to find replacements who understand market psychology."