Ralph Nelson Elliott (1871–1948) was an American accountant, not a scientist by training — he spent most of his career doing accounting and consulting work in Central America (including a stint as Chief Accountant for Nicaragua under U.S. State Department appointment) before poor health forced early retirement in the early 1930s. With time on his hands, he turned to studying decades of stock market data and noticed that prices didn't move randomly but formed a repeating, fractal pattern: five "impulse" waves in the direction of the larger trend, followed by three "corrective" waves against it — with the same 5-3 pattern repeating at every scale, from decades down to hours. He published this as The Wave Principle in 1938, followed by Nature's Law — The Secret of the Universe (1946), in which he explicitly connected the pattern to Fibonacci numbers and argued it reflected a deeper natural law governing crowd psychology, not just markets. Elliott's theory attracted little attention in his lifetime but became hugely influential in technical analysis from the 1970s onward via Robert Prechter. For this forum, Elliott represents an independently-derived, fractal/self-similar view of market cycles that sits alongside Gann's and Hurst's very different approaches — worth comparing to harmonics theory's own scale-invariant, whole-number-ratio structure.

[Thanks to Claude(AI)]