Editor’s note: Bill Voelker was a long-time friend of Joe Granville and prepared this to honor his friend several years ago. It is reprinted here with permission. Science’s job is to reduce all mysteries to trivialities.                                                                   – Niels Bohr There was no successful mathematical treatment to physics before the 16th century, nor to chemistry and biology before the 18th century. This, the 20th century, has seen similar stirrings applying the science of mathematics to the successful treatment of economic and financial problems and concepts.  No one has done more in this area than Joseph Ensign Granville, born in 1923 in Yonkers, NY.  He’s been compared to Elmer Gantry and called the P. T. Barnum of the 20th century. To listen to

For the past 24 years Joseph Granville has been living with his wife Karen in Kansas City Missouri. He is best known as a stock market Technical Analyst. Now almost 85, his latest book How to Read the Stock Market explains and applies his entire theory of On-Balance Volume. Granville was born on August 20, 1923 in Yonkers, New York. His early education and training was music, improvisingat the piano at 3. Finished his high school training on a music scholarship at the Todd School For Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, a school made famous by the recent graduation there of Orson Wells. Following a school bus tour to Monterrey and Saltillo in Mexico, he was inspired to write his first book, A SCHOOL BOY’S FAITH which was published by Fleming Revell, New York and London, in 1941. It not only was a travelogue in poetry, but also is philosophy of life. While a

Although the market has been on a tear, the performance of the SPYDRs (SPY), in the 15 minutes prior to the ringing of the closing bell (15:45 to 16:00 ET), has not been profitable. Below are the performance results of four different trading sessions when trading the SPY in the 418 trading days from January 2, 2012 until August 30, 2013 Despite an impressive gain of $28.11 in the 9:00 to 15:00 session, our storyline focuses on the $12.31 summary loss in the 15 minutes prior to the ringing of the closing bell (15:45 to 16:00 session). Certainly such a performance discrepancy is striking, but the question is, how can we best profit from this loss? This study addresses the reasons for this downward trending pattern. And, more importantly, it demonstrates how you can turn a profit when trading in the final 15 minutes of the regular trading session. Figure 1: This is a

Editor’s note: This report was originally published by Phases & Cycles on September 30, 2013 and is reprinted here with permission. This bull market continues to throw a few curve balls at both investors and forecasters. In recent Market Comments we suggested that the current 105- day calendar cycle, which started in late June, was likely to have a negative bias and might even threaten to take out the June lows. We viewed this scenario as a positive one for the longer term health of the bull market, which periodically needs refreshing through a more extended corrective process. The S&P 500 duly rose from its late June low on the back of the new 105-day cycle. The July advance was followed by a weak August that coincided with the maturation of some shorter-term cycles. Soon thereafter, one of our recent “Ron’s Briefs” mentioned the prospect that, contrary to the popular belief, September

After last month’s article on ethics, we received a question that shows how difficult it can be to apply ethics on the job: I have an ethics question that has bothered me for years. It is in regards to giving clients/subscribers time to acts on a BUY/SELL signal. My subscribers always know what level they will get a BUY/SELL signal at. Let’s randomly pick a stock, ABT Abbott Laboratories, and let’s assume it is on a BUY signal. Let assume that I own it as well. If I publish a newsletter that says to SELL ABT, I would need to wait several days before selling my position. BUT, what if the subscribers always know what the stop loss is?  Meaning, my newsletter says, “SELL ABT on a close below $33 per share.” If price goes below the cited level, would I still need to wait the 2 days after price breaches