The Heretics of Finance: Conversations with Leading Practitioners of Technical Analysis

Chapter 6. Robert J. Farrell

I look at the message of the market. I believe in long term cycles; there are no new eras, only old eras that go to new excesses, and there is the return to the mean.

Robert J. Farrell was at Merrill Lynch for half a century before he retired in 2004. He was chief market analyst until 1992, when he assumed a new role as senior investment adviser. He published Wall Street's first report on longer term theme and sector changes in the market. He ranked first sixteen times in the market timing category of Institutional Investor magazine's All America Research Team, and in 1993 was inducted into the Wall $treet Week Hall of Fame. He is a founder and first president of the Market Technicians Association.

Farrell holds a bachelor's degree in economics and finance from Manhattan College and a master's degree in investment finance from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

What led to your interest in technical analysis?

Everything with me was simultaneously accidental and planned. I went to Columbia University Graduate School of Business in the mid'50s and had both Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, the authors of Security Analysis—the bible of stock market analysts— as teachers. My expectation was that I would get a job on Wall Street as a security analyst. When I got to Wall Street, I had no background in technical analysis and no particular interest ...