In 1939, Financial World magazine published twelve articles by R.N. Elliott entitled "The Wave Principle." The original publisher's note, in the introduction to the articles, stated the following:

During the past seven or eight years, publishers of financial magazines and organizations in the investment advisory field have been virtually flooded with "systems" for which their proponents have claimed great accuracy in forecasting stock market movements. Some of them appeared to work for a while. It was immediately obvious that others had no value whatever. All have been looked upon by The Financial World with great skepticism. But after investigation of Mr. R.N. Elliott's Wave Principle, The Financial World became convinced that a series of articles on this subject would be interesting and instructive to its readers. To the individual reader is left the determination of the value of the Wave Principle as a working tool in market forecasting, but it is believed that it should prove at least a useful check upon conclusions based on economic considerations.

— The Editors of The Financial World

In the rest of this course, we reverse the editors' suggested procedure and argue that economic considerations at best may be thought of as an ancillary tool in checking market forecasts based entirely upon the Elliott Wave Principle.

Ratio Analysis

Ratio analysis is the assessment of the proportionate relationship, in time and amplitude, of one wave to another. In discerning the working of the Golden Ratio in the five up and three down movement of the stock market cycle, one might anticipate that on completion of any bull phase, the ensuing correction would be three-fifths of the previous rise in both time and amplitude. Such simplicity is seldom seen. However, the underlying tendency of the market to conform to relationships suggested by the Golden Ratio is always present and helps generate the right look for each wave.

The study of wave amplitude relationships in the stock market can often lead to such startling discoveries that some Elliott Wave practitioners have become almost obsessive about its importance. Although Fibonacci time ratios are far less common, years of plotting the averages have convinced the authors that the amplitude (measured either arithmetically or in percentage terms) of virtually every wave is related to the amplitude of an adjacent, alternate and/or component wave by one of the ratios between Fibonacci numbers. However, we shall endeavor to present the evidence and let it stand or fall on its own merit.