The Stock Market Barometer

The Stock Market Barometer: A Study of Its Forecast Value Based on Charles H. Dow’s Theory of the Price Movement. With an Analysis of the Market and Its History Since 1897

William P. Hamilton originally published The Stock Market Barometer in 1922. Hamilton spent a career in financial journalism and became an editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Introduction (From Author):

An English economist whose unaffected humanity always made him remarkably readable, the late William Stanley J evons, propounded the theory of a connection between commercial panics and spots on the sun. He gave a series of dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century, showing an apparent coincidence between the two phenomena. It is entirely human and likable that he belittled a rather ugly commercial squeeze of two centuries ago because there were not then a justifying number of spots on the sun.

Writing in the New York Times early in 1905, in comment on the J evons theory, I said that while Wall Street in its heart believed in a cycle of panic and prosperity, it did not care if there were enough spots on the sun to make a straight flush. Youth is temerarious and irreverent. Perhaps it would have been more polite to say that the accidental periodic association proved nothing, like the exact coincidence of presidential elections with leap years.

Many teachers of economics, and many business men without pretension even to the more modest title of student, have a profound and reasonable faith in a cycle in the a ff airs of men. It does not need an understanding of the Einstein theory of relativity to see that the world cannot possibly progress in a straight line in its moral development. The movement would be at least more likely to resemble the journey of our satellite around the sun, which, with all its planetary attendants, is moving toward the constellation of Vega. Certainly the poets believe in the cycle theory.

There is a wonderful passage in Byron’s “Childe Harold” which, to do it justice, should be read from the preceding apostrophe to Metella’s Tower. This was Byron’s cycle: “Here is the moral of all human tales, Tis but the same rehearsal of the past; First freedom and then glory; when that fails Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last, And history, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.” There seems to be a cycle of panics and of times of prosperity. Anyone with a working knowledge of modern history could recite our panic dates-1837, 1857, 1866 (Overend-Gurney panic in London}, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907, if he might well hesitate to add the deflation year of 1920. Panics, at least, show a variable interval between them, from ten to fourteen years, with the intervals apparently tending to grow longer. In a subsequent chapter we shall analyze this cycle theory, to test its possible usefulness.

Contents:

• CYCLES AND STOCK MARKET RECORDS
• WALL STREET OF THE MOVIES.
• CHARLES H. DOW, AND HIS THEORY
• Dow’s THEORY, APPLIED TO SPECULATION
• MAJOR MRKET SWINGS
• A UNIQUE QUALITY OF FORECAST
• MANIPULATION AND PROFESSIONAL TRADINQ
• MECHANICS OF THE MARKET
• ”WATER” IN THE BAROMETER
• “A LITTLE CLOUD OUT OF THE SEA, LIKE A MAN’S HAND”-1906
• THE UNPUNCTURED CYCLE
• FORECASTING A BULL MARKET-1908-1909
• NATURE AND USES OF SECONDARY SWINGS
• 1909, AND SOME DEFECTS OF HISTORY
• A ”LINE” AND AN EXAMPLE-1914
• AN EXCEPTION TO PROVE THE RULE
• ITS GREATEST VINDICATION-1917
• WHAT REGULATION DID TO OUR RAILROADS
• A STUDY IN MANIPULATION-1900-1
• SOME CONCLUSIONS-1910-14
• RUNNING TRUE TO FORM-1922-1925
• SOME THOUGHTS FOR SPECULATORS

The Stock Market Barometer By William Peter Hamilton PDF