- Phone : 1-800-336-1618
(770-536-0309 Internationally) - URL :
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Elliot Wave Financial's flagship service, Financial Forecast, is an often reliable yet at times dense and somewhat inaccessible subscription newsletter for investors and traders who want a comprehensive technical analysis education. Financial Forecast is well suited for intermediate traders with a baseline understanding of TA, or for day traders who want to buff up their chart reading skills to make better-informed investment decisions.
Pros:
- Reputable track record of financial forecasting
Commodities and broad market index tracking (S&P 500, NASDAQ, etc.) - Affordable price point compared to other leading subscriptions
- Short-term market updates 3x weekly
- Analyses and chart reads by real, credentialed TA experts
Cons:
- Technically complex chart-reading
- Might require supplementary education
If you want to become a better trader, the technical analysis skills taught by Elliott Wave International’s Financial Forecast service are invaluable. Getting ahead of the market by reading historical chart patterns is a must-have skill for any day trader or investor looking to make money in securities, derivatives, forex, or commodities markets.
Technical analysis (TA) doesn’t predict where the market will go. Instead, it estimates where low-risk, high-reward trading opportunities are most likely to pop up. Elliott Wave International’s Financial Forecast service uses historical precedents and human behavioral psychology to craft a unique TA approach designed to identify such opportunities.
For years I heard the buzz about Elliott Wave International (the good and the bad), but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to test their flagship service myself. After a few weeks of testing it out, I decided to put together this comprehensive Elliott Wave Financial Forecast review to decide whether it’s worth the $69/month sticker price.
The Selling Point: Hochberg’s Weekly Updates
The “Short Term Update”, one of the Financial Forecast’s core features, is published three times a week and provides chart analysis by Steven Hochberg. Despite the name, the updates cover everything from mega-cap market indices (NASDAQ, S&P 500) to gold, silver, the euro, the U.S. dollar, and U.S. Treasury bond futures.
The updates aren’t exactly comprehensive. Each Short Term Update is about 10 paragraphs in length, with one or two accompanying charts for each. The insights are astute, as Hochberg packs an impressive number of references and citations to recent financial news to substantiate his observations of the market.
You’ll notice in the example below that Hochberg’s analysis of the $SLV’s downward price volatility is attributed to the media-driven silver short squeeze. This occurred in late-January on the heels of the GameStop short squeeze orchestrated by Reddit’s /r/WallStreetBets community.
Source: Short Term Update (Feb 3)
In my view, these kinds of observations, at the very least, prove that some degree of critical thinking has taken place which you simply wouldn’t get with an automated service. I could tell that this report was authored by someone who sat down and did their homework as opposed to a bot or algorithm which, sadly, are becoming all too common in financial analysis services.
Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast tells part of the story regarding how financial markets work. I’ve found that many of their predictions and analyses in their Short Term Updates to be accurate enough to make the average investor money in the long-term.
Busy schedule? You can bring Hochberg’s updates with you on-the-go since they’re also available in audio format. I found this to be a super convenient feature that makes it easy to stay informed on market conditions at any point in your day. Plus, it’s a much-needed accessibility feature for the visually impaired.
Are Their Weekly Updates Accurate?
No financial forecasting service is right 100% of the time. If they were, they’d be in charge of BlackRock and Vanguard. Nonetheless, Elliott Wave’s techniques are backed by a history of accurate predictions and real-life behavioral patterns.
In many cases, Hochberg’s weekly updates, which are included in every Financial Forecasts subscription, are remarkably accurate. Take, for example, his February 3 update which had a bearish outlook on the price of silver.
Source: Short-Term Update for Wednesday, Feb 3, 2021, 5:00 p.m. Eastern
In the segment above, Hochberg forecasts that a “fifth wave decline should draw prices below $26.09.” Below, note that silver prices did indeed bottom out at precisely $26.09 per ounce the following day (Feb. 4) at 4 p.m., which would’ve made for a terrific long position entry.
Source: BullionVault
Generally, I found that many of Financial Forecast’s predictions erred on the side of being too conservative. For example, Hochberg’s prediction on February 1 called for a pullback after the NASDAQ Composite index hit a ceiling of 13,600.
Source: Short-Term Update for Monday, Feb 1, 2021, 4:56 p.m. Eastern.
In reality, this pullback never happened. As I write this, on February 8, the NASDAQ is sitting at an all-time high of $13,987 and counting, as depicted by the index’s price chart below.
Source: Google Finance
The previous Friday, on January 29, the update called for a descending wave in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJIA) somewhere between 30,233 and 30,600 during the week beginning February 1.
Source: Short-Term Update, Jan 29, 2021, 4:57 p.m. Eastern
Although the DJIA did indeed pull back on a couple of occasions that week, these occurred well beyond the resistance points that Hochberg anticipated. In the chart below, you can see that the first and most significant downward price movement took place at the $30,807 mark on the afternoon of February 2nd.
Source: Google Finance
Clearly not every bearish signal turns out to be a true indicator of real market sentiment. The same is true of bullish indicators. In truth, there’s really no telling what way the market is going to react to unfolding events, especially in such uncertain times.
However, the fact remains that the TA methods do create winning trades and have worked to make countless investors a lot of money over the years. The key is to realize that not every trade will be a winner, and that you have to exercise your best judgment before taking any position in the market.
What We Don’t Like / Areas for Improvement
I don’t think I’ve ever run into a financial education service as hit-or-miss as Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast, at least regarding the quality of their instructions and insights. A basic subscription to Financial Forecast gives you access to a trove of educational resources and handbooks, including some top-notch textbooks written by the company’s founder, as well as slipshod 10-page manuals that look like they were thrown together by an intern in the span of a weekend.
For example, I’ve pasted a couple of introductory pages from the PDF How to Use the Elliott Wave Principle, one of the educational resources offered to subscribers. It doesn’t have an author, date, or publisher attached to it, which is the first major red flag.
As you’ll notice below, the text itself is almost as good as useless. It goes over the basic concepts of TA without unpacking why we should expect to see these patterns in the market. It presents its ideas—and pretty clumsily if you ask me—as if they were dogmatic assumptions we’re supposed to believe in without evidence.
Source: “Discovering How to Use The Elliott Wave Principle”, PDF Document
Sure, the pages above teach me that financial markets move in wave-like patterns. This much is obvious. But it doesn’t explain the logic behind why they move this way. If we’re shelling out $69 per month for one of the world’s best financial newsletters, I’d expect something a bit more in-depth than this.
Now let’s take the opposite example. A subscription to Financial Forecast also gets you a free copy of The Basics of the Elliott Wave Principle, which was originally published in 1995 and whose most recent version came out in August 2007. This text is 46 pages long, is authored by company founder Robert R. Prechter, and is published under New Classics Library.
Unlike the other PDF, The Basics of the Elliott Wave Principle is the real deal. It starts small by introducing us to the nomenclature of technical analysis (seen below), such as the various wave extension levels, and the visual differences between bear and bull markets.
Source: The Basics of the Elliott Wave Principle (2007 ed.)
As you can see below, the charts outlined in Basics of the Elliott Wave Principle increase in technical sophistication. While these aren’t well-suited for beginners, they provide excellent insights for more advanced TA specialists looking to take their market awareness to levels on par with industry professionals.
Below, you’ll notice that the book goes to great lengths to explain each variance in a chart pattern and its underlying logic. With Financial Forecast, you don’t get a skin-deep analysis. Instead, you get a university-level masterclass in technical analysis and a short, thrice-weekly update that does the heavy lifting for you so you can quickly identify trade opportunities.
Source: Basics of Elliott Wave Principle (p. 35).
It’s no surprise that Elliott Wave International’s Financial Forecast is technical—like, really technical. There were many points where I felt like I lost the plot and couldn’t quite follow the regimented rules and pattern-recognition techniques. Even if you, like me, can get bogged down in the technical jargon, you can always fall back on the video guides and short, accessible market updates provided three times every week in much simpler language.
Can Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast Help You Make Money?
Finally, the million-dollar question. The answer, in short, is yes. A subscription to Elliott Wave International’s Financial Forecast can indeed help you identify market lows suitable as entry positions on the long side and market highs to identify profit-taking opportunities or short plays.
Elliott Wave’s chart reading techniques, which can take weeks if not months to master, are complex and open to various interpretations. Company founder Robert Prechter said it himself in Basics of the Elliott Wave Principle:
“[…] At any time, two or more valid wave interpretations are usually acceptable by the rules of the Wave Principle. The rules are highly specific and keep the number of valid alternatives to a minimum. Among the valid alternatives, the [trader] will generally regard as preferred the interpretation that satisfies the largest number of guidelines and will accord top alternate status to the interpretation satisfying the next largest number of guidelines, and so on.” (p. 29).
As you can see, the Elliott Wave theory of technical analysis, which is outlined in full in every Financial Forecast subscription, is a system of probabilities. The techniques outlined in Financial Forecast don’t guarantee that you’ll find the optimal opportunity for making a winning trade. What they do give you, however, is the best chance to maximize your return based on historical market behavior.
Video Library: Extensive, But Dated
It’s a bit of a stretch to call it a video “library”, but Financial Forecast does contain about 120 minutes’ worth of exclusive educational video content for learning technical analysis. The main video, Counting Waves Correctly, was originally released on VHS in 1996 but looks straight out of the 1970s—makes you feel old, doesn’t it?
Source: Counting Waves Correctly (1996) [Stream]
There are a few other videos to supplement your knowledge of TA and what Elliott Wave describes as “socionomics”, which maps the effect of social moods on market behavior. These include:
- “A Grand Supercycle Strut Down the Catwalk” (2015) [19:59]
- “Just What Is Deflation – And Why Should You Care?” (2020) [29:48]
- “Anyone Can Learn Elliott” [28:27]
These videos introduce you to concepts such as the Fibonacci sequence trading, precision ratios, and Fibonacci ratios. If you want to eventually go out on your own and create your own TA-based stock trading technique, these are core concepts that you’ll have to master, and Mr. Prechter himself does a great job laying them out in this video.
Source: Anyone Can Learn Elliott [Stream]
The last video, Anyone Can Learn Elliott, makes it clear that just about anyone can learn to apply the Elliott Wave method to financial market trading. The video stars a 9-year-old boy who is able to recognize bearish and bullish chart patterns utilized in Financial Forecasts, which helped me realize that many of the technical concepts taught by Elliott Wave are relatively simple ideas but dressed up in complex, theoretical language.
Customer Care, Refunds, and Cancellations
While Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast isn’t risk-free, their refund and cancellation policy makes it a very low-risk investment. It costs $69 flat per month with no surprises and no added charges on your credit card statement. The first month is billed separately, and even subsequent recharge is billed on a quarterly basis for $207 (69*3).
If you feel like you need to cancel your subscription for whatever reason, you can cancel with no questions asked and receive a pro-rated refund for whatever months you paid for but didn’t use. In other words, if I paid $207 for a quarterly subscription on January 1 but decided to cancel on January 30, I’d receive $138 back for the two unrealized months on my account.
After using the service for one month, we noticed that our account was automatically charged for a second quarterly subscription. On March 8, our account was billed $207 USD. On March 23, nearly two weeks after our billing date, we requested a full refund for the charge. The next day, a customer care representative got back to us informing us that they had processed a full refund for the entire charge (not a pro-rated refund), which was a very pleasant surprise.
Overall, we were very happy with how quickly Elliott Wave’s customer service representative took care of our inquiry. In our books, this is a huge plus, since several other stock trading analysis subscriptions make it much more difficult to issue refunds – that is, if they even offer refunds at all. Rest assured, if you want to cancel your Elliott Wave Financial Forecast subscription you probably won’t run into any issues.
Who Is Behind Elliot Wave’s Financial Forecast?
As we’ve already mentioned, Financial Forecast is the flagship service of Elliott Wave International, a private company incorporated in 1978.
Elliott Wave International employs a host of independent market analysts—27, to be exact—who are well-credentialed financial industry professionals. These analysts are responsible for the predictions and insights provided in Financial Forecast, including:
- Steven Hochberg (Chief Market Analyst)
- Matt Lampert (Director of Research)
- Robert Kelley (Senior Market Analyst)
- Peter Kendall (Chief Analyst for U.S. Markets)
- Jordan Kotick (Intraday Interest Rates Analyst)
The Elliott Wave International team is headed by founder Robert R. Prechter, a former Merrill Lynch technical analyst, who started the company originally as a monthly newsletter entitled The Elliot Wave Theorist in 1976. Now headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia, Robert Pretcher’s suite of financial information services is one of the leading authorities on behavioral finance, pattern recognition, and socionomics available online.
We’re often asked: “Is Elliott Wave International legit?” Although I first heard of the company at least a decade ago on investing forums, it wasn’t until recently when I actually discovered for myself that Elliot Wave is indeed an internationally trusted TA firm. Both Elliot Wave and its founder, Robert Prechter, have received coverage by mainstream media outlets such as Scientific American, Barron’s, Bloomberg, Forbes, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal.
Longevity speaks volumes in the financial forecasting industry. The fact that Elliott Wave International is now in its sixth decade in business says a lot about how reliable they are as a service. In this industry, the majority of forecasting firms don’t make it past the 10-year mark without going out of business or getting on the bad side of the SEC.
In Summary
There’s a lot to like about Financial Forecast. In this Elliott Wave International review, I went over what I considered to be the biggest pros and cons of their flagship service, Financial Forecast, based on several weeks of first-hand testing.
Elliott Wave’s underlying assumption is that the market moves in predictable ways. The question is whether they’re predictable enough to let you predictably win more than you lose. Now, we can’t conclusively say that’s the case—Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast is certainly hit-or-miss, like all trading services. But, no doubt, you can improve your trading skills if you apply their techniques properly in the right situations.
Although the quality of their products and analyses vary widely from feature to feature, no Elliott Wave Financial Forecast review would be complete without making mention of the fact that it’s ultimately a low-risk service. The entry price of Financial Forecast is only $69 per month, and its refund policy is more than fair. If you find that the wealth of technical analysis and chart-reading information is a step beyond your level, you can cancel and get your money back for any months you haven’t used in your subscription.
If you want a more complete understanding of financial markets, I would recommend supplementing Elliott Wave’s Financial Forecast with other trading and investment education services. Personally, I’d consider checking out Investors Underground if you want a more hands-on approach to day trading, whereas a Capitalist Exploits subscription can help bring you up to speed on asymmetric trade opportunities in the market for safe-bet returns.
- Phone : 1-800-336-1618
(770-536-0309 Internationally) - URL :
- Global Rating
- Very Good
User Rating
- 0 No reviews yet!
Elliot Wave Financial's flagship service, Financial Forecast, is an often reliable yet at times dense and somewhat inaccessible subscription newsletter for investors and traders who want a comprehensive technical analysis education. Financial Forecast is well suited for intermediate traders with a baseline understanding of TA, or for day traders who want to buff up their chart reading skills to make better-informed investment decisions.
