Forbes® Best Business Mistakes: How Today's Top Business Leaders Turned Missteps into Success

Chapter 8. ROBERT PRECHTER

Founder and president of Elliott Wave International

Chosen "Guru of the Decade" (1980s) by Financial News Network (now CNBC)

Author or editor of 13 books, including New York Times best seller Conquer the Crash

For the rest of Robert Prechter's life, he will always be linked to something he did in 1987:

Prechter ... known for his prediction of the 1987 stock market crash ... (Wall Street Journal)

Prechter ... [who] forecast the 1987 market crash ... (New York Times)

Prechter ... who told investors to sell their stocks weeks before the October 1987 crash ... (Barron's)

When you're a stock market analyst, it doesn't get much bigger than predicting a crash—and getting it right. But Prechter wants to be appreciated for more than that.

"People tend to say, 'Oh, he just calls crashes,'" Prechter says, "but I was super-bullish through the whole 1980s, actually from 1975 forward."

He wants to be known for his overall predictions.

"If they're going to go back that far," he says, "I wish they'd say I wrote a super-bullish book in 1978 (Elliott Wave Principle—Key to Market Behavior), updated it in 1982, and called for a great bull market that would turn into a great mania, which ultimately fully retraced."

Fully retraced?

That's part of the lexicon of the man known for popularizing key theories of the Elliott Wave Principle (EWP). It was a set of theories first put forth in the 1930s by Ralph Nelson Elliott, who argued that people are rhythmical beings who go through certain ...