Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017

Elo

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1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

interesting time based economic model for stock market stalls...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/crash-guru-warns-the-dow-could-plunge-to-14800-and-todays-a-date-to-watch-2017-03-13

"He’s currently on the lookout for the benchmark to approach that upper green line, which represents a range of 21,800 to 22,000. "

“Don’t just go short,” he said. “ That’s where the public gets it all wrong. You have to wait for a break of the low of that weekly bar, and put a stop above the high.”

And here’s the crux of Jadeja’s concerns: If the rally inspired by last year’s presidential election continues, the Dow industrials could hit that 22,000 level — but if it fails, the pullback could be steep, or even steeper, based on history.

One level down would take the DJIA to 18,600, while moving two full levels lower would bring it to the aforementioned 14,800 level.

2gjm9y

This sort of technical analysis is usually nonsense. Is there any reason to think this case is better? This person claims a strong track record of predicting market crashes on particular dates. Here's an example from July 2016; he says to look out for trouble in the Dow Jones (1) between 2016-08-26 and 2016-08-30, (2) on 2016-09-26, and (3) on 2016-10-20. No prizes for guessing the outcome: the Dow Jones was just fine on and around all three of those dates. (That example was the first one I found, by the way. No cherrypicking on my part.) So I think he's a bullshitter who makes a lot of predictions and then afterwards points to the ones that happened to be somewhere in the vicinity of the truth. [EDITED to add:] One reason articles like this call him a "crash guru" is that he allegedly predicted the "flash crash" of August 2015. But let's just look a little more closely at these impressive results (which you can be sure are the ones he quotes to impress journalists): [...] Looks good. Until you actually read carefully. This lists three predictions. (1) A major volatile move between the 7th and 18th of August. Allegedly fulfilled by a crash on ... the 24th of August. Nope, sorry, if you quote a particular date range then something happening outside that date range does not count as a correct prediction. (2) A "period to be careful of" between the 13th and 23rd of September. The DJIA was just fine during that period. (3) A drop on the 14th or 17th of September. Allegedly fulfilled by a drop on the 18th. Nope, if you predict specific dates then something on a different date does not count as a correct prediction. What actually happened: the DJIA was pretty stable through the "major volatile move" period. Then a week later it had a crash which Jadeja didn't predict. Then it was rather volatile for a month or so, a period in which Jadeja mentioned a couple of specific bad dates that were in fact no worse than any others during that volatile period. So, again, I r