Futurist Market Analyst Cycles Expert bio
Peter Temple

The Journey to This Point

It began in 2006. I got interested in trading stocks online, and spent a couple of years or so getting a very expensive introductory education.

But something was bugging me. The strategy all seemed to be based on small patterns with no real rhyme or reason provided as to why they worked. That’s an unsettling situation for me. I have a need to understand the underlying influences, or logic. So I dug deeper.

Suddenly, I fell over Elliott Waves. The key principle of Elliottwaves is that a “trend” moves in five waves and a “countertrend” in three. The framework for the moves is something called Fibonacci numbers. The waves move in distinct patterns and their lengths are related to the length of the preceding wave. And yes, it works – the best when trending (when waves are in sequences of 5).

I proved that to myself during the drop of 2007-8, which I rather casually shorted. And made several times my principal.

I’ve now spent tens of thousands of hours in the markets over almost ten years. Recognizing Elliott Waves patterns after that period of time becomes second nature. I also found out that over the past three hundred years, we’ve completed five waves of “cycle degree” (the highest level). You see, Elliott waves are fractal, which means that there are waves within waves that move based on the same principles. As I write this (in September, 2014), we’re about to change direction and head down … far down.

In 2009, I heard about a ground-breaking book, The Fourth Turning. It explained how cyclical waves run through society and related them to historical periods of about a hundred years. This extraordinary piece of work convinced me that we go through a major cycle of bust and boom every 85-100 years. The book provides the data that dates back to the Wars of the Roses. These cycles bore a resemblance to what happens with Elliottwaves over long periods of time.

So now I had two independent bodies of work that explained that events happen in recurring cycles. They both also forecast an upcoming depression, combined with a major cultural and financial revolution. I began to wonder about other cycles.

I also discovered that the number phi (the Golden Mean, derived from the Fibonacci sequence) runs through absolutely everything, from plant life, to sea creatures, to human beings, to the sun and planets. It certainly runs through the stock market and currencies—in fact, with such accuracy, you can trade very successfully by them (it’s called “technical analysis”).

How Climate Change Mirrors the Markets

About two years ago, the “noise” about man-made warming started to become deafening. Being a sailor and having experienced the power of Mother Nature first-hand, I knew that human influence over the weather was next to none. Weather is far too powerful and the area over which it operates far too vast.

Around about the same time, I came across an article about the tremendous number and severity of tornados in the US midwest in 1974. I thought to myself, “Hmmm … that year was the bottom of a very big recession!” (In fact, to Elliott-wavers, it’s known as a fourth wave.)

I also knew that the weather in the 1930s was a combination of dry and hot – likely the largest continuous weather extreme in modern history.

Was this just coincidence, or could they be related?

I began to dig a little deeper and came across Dr. Raymond Wheeler, whose life work in documenting the Earth’s climate over some twenty centuries was for me, the key piece of the puzzle that brought it all together.

Dr. Wheeler discovered that we experience climate cycles of 25, 100, 500, and 1000 years, revolving in a pattern of spring (wet-warm), summer (hot-dry), fall (cool-wet), and winter (cold dry). These cycles, or patterns are fractal, but generally predictable. In fact, they’re fractal in the same way Elliottwaves are fractal.

We know that climate is affected by what happens in the cosmos (changes in the Sun, in particular). From my sailing experience, I am well aware that humans are highly affected by changes in the position of the planets.

For example, look at what the moon does to the oceans around the world every time it revolves around the earth. Huge bodies of water (the tides) flow out and in. Human beings are approximately 60% water. Just ask the police what a full moon does to us on a regular basis – it makes us crazy!

The truth is (and we’ve known this for centuries) that the sun, our moon, the planets, and the milky way create the climate we experience on earth. There are recent studies that show how dramatically fluctuations in climate affects humans.

We also know that stock markets are a mathematical representation of the human psyche on a mass scale. Humans affect the way the market moves, not the other way around. Events do not shape the way the market moves; humans do, and events are a by-product of how humans are feeling. Therefore, the mood of the masses determines the future of the markets.

What has become obvious over all the reading and observations I’ve recently experienced that what happens to us on earth is cyclical and controlled by forces much more powerful than us. It’s either man’s ignorance or arrogance that leads politicians and scientists to think we can change the climate and our destiny.

With this site, the help and insight of others, and my forty years of experience in business, training, speaking, and writing, directing, and producing television, that I hope to help others understand the forces at work during the tumultuous period we’re going through.

The Earth is cooling and becoming dryer. Historically, it means at least a major recession, problems with the food chain, civil wars, and a world-wide epidemic. This combination recurs every 172 years like clockwork. 2007 was the end of a 172 cycle of recurring depressions. We’re not prepared and we’re not paying attention. We don’t learn from history.

If we were smarter and and did indeed pay attention to history, maybe we’d be able to plan for these events and circumvent the tragedy that we otherwise bring upon ourselves.

We live in extraordinarily interesting times.