Dollar's Hit a "Major Bottom," Prechter Says: Why That's Not Such Good News

by Peter Gorenstein in Newsmakers, Commodities

Related: ^DJI, ^GSPC, UUP, UDN, TBT, GLD, SLV

Forget all the talk about the dollar being in terminal decline. The recent rally in the greenback is for real, says Robert Prechter, president of Elliott Wave International. The man who correctly predicted the 1987 crash and last year's peak in oil prices now says we're "going to be up for a year or two in the dollar."

Reuters and other mainstream news outlets attribute the recent uptick in the dollar versus other major currencies to an improving economy signaled by Friday's "stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs numbers." Prechter, ever the contrarian, says the U.S. dollar has put in a major bottom but not for the reasons everyone else is pointing to.

Prechter points to three factors:

• The Elliott Wave Pattern: Without getting too technical (for your sake and mine) Elliott Wave Theory looks at markets cycles in terms of wave structures that come in five parts. Five waves up followed by five waves down. Well, according to Prechter's research the pattern confirms we recently hit the fifth wave down. Next stop: up.
• Sentiment has reached an extreme: "The Dollar Sentiment Index for the Dollar Index reports just 3% bulls among traders, an extreme level only five times in the past 20 years, usually near an important low," Prechter wrote on Aug. 5. "The last time we saw readings like this was March-July 2008, just before the dollar soared." In other words, the "short the dollar" trade is overly crowded.
• The biggest risk to the economy is deflation not inflation: As he lays out in his book, Conquer the Crash, Prechter thinks the bursting of the latest bubble will lead to a major economic depression.

As we discuss in forthcoming segments, this good news for the dollar spells bad news for most other asset classes including stocks, commodities and real estate.

Bob Prechter "Quite Sure" Next Wave Down Will Be Bigger and March Lows Will Break

by Aaron Task in Investing, Newsmakers

Related: ^DJI, ^GSPC, SPY, DIA, QQQQ, ^RUT, BGZ

In late February, Robert Prechter of Elliott Wave International said "cover your shorts," and predicted a sharp rally that would take the S&P into the 1000 to 1100 range.

With that prediction having come to pass, Prechter is now saying investors should "step aside" from long positions, and speculators should "start looking at the short side."

"The big question is whether the rally is over," Prechter says, suggesting "countertrend moves can be tricky" to predict. But the veteran market watcher is "quite sure the next wave down is going to be larger than what we've already experienced," and take major averages well below their March 2009 lows.

Yes, the late 2007-early 2009 market debacle was just a warm-up to what Prechter believes will be the bear market's main attraction. In this regard, he says the current cycle will echo past post-bubble periods such as America in the 1930s and England in the 1720s, after the bursting of the South Sea bubble.

The 2000 market peak market a "major trend change" for the market from a very long-term cycle perspective, and the downside is going to continue to be painful well into the next decade, Prechter says. "The extreme overvaluation, the manic buying and bubbles in the late 1990s [and] mid-2000s are for the history books - they're very large," he says. "The bear market is going to have balance that out with some sort of significant retrenchment."