Named after Munehisa Homma‘s hometown in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, Sakata’s Five Methods comprise the following patterns: Three Mountains Pattern, Three Rivers Pattern, Three Parallel Lines Pattern and the Three Methods Pattern. These patterns created the foundation for Homma’s Japanese Candlestick analysis.
Leonardo Pisano, better known by his nickname, Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician born in Pisa in the 12th century. He is known to have discovered the Fibonacci numbers, said to be based upon observations of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh in Egypt. Fibonacci Numbers are a sequence of numbers where each successive number is the … Read more
Famous commodities trader Richard Dennis was having an ongoing debate with his friend and business partner Bill Eckhardt about whether great traders are born or made – whether it is possible to teach the ability to trade successfully. While Dennis firmly believed that trading abilities could be broken down into a quantifiable system of rules … Read more
Ralph Nelson Elliott (1871-1948) was an accountant and business executive with railroad companies in Mexico and Central America. A serious physical malady, possibly anemia left him bedridden and forced into retirement in 1929. As a distraction, Elliott turned to study the stock market and the historical price movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Elliott … Read more
A revision to the Bretton Woods Accord, signed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in December 1971. This agreement aimed to maintain fixed exchange rates, but without using gold, and to allow greater fluctuation between currencies. While Bretton Woods allowed the dollar to float in a range of 1 percent, the Smithsonian Agreement proposed … Read more
Nelson Bunker and William Herbert Hunt were the heirs of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. The family was one of the richest in America at the time. In the early 1970’s the family decided to buy silver as a hedge against inflation, and amassed it in great quantity. In the fall of 1979, the Hunt Brothers, … Read more
Methods of regulating the foreign exchange market – such as fixing currency values to a commodity such as gold, or setting maximum exchange rate fluctuations had proven to too rigid. After the regulatory mechanisms- such as the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Accord and the Smithsonian Agreement – were no longer in place, the currency … Read more
The Bretton Woods Accord was established in 1944, towards the end of World War II. The United Nations Monetary Fund convened in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, with representatives from the United States, Great Britain and France. The Bretton Woods Accord established the policy of pegging currencies against the U.S. dollar in order to stabilise the … Read more
In 1790, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, issued $80 million in bonds to pay for the Revolutionary War. On May 17, 1792 a group of twenty-four merchants and brokers gathered under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street in lower Manhattan, New York City, and agreed to trade the securities. The … Read more