I've sat with the best programmers who tried to 'code' what I do. The results have been fantastic. No programmer has ever succeeded, for if they did, the game is over.

people are so easily deluded into nonsense as long as its old...
can't wait for 40 years in this game.

I have been trying to trade for about 4 years and I have talked to a lot of so called gurus. One thing for sure you must have a successful plkan and stick with it

...
If you will only study the weakness of human nature and see what fools these mortals be, you will find it easy to make profits by understanding the weakness of human nature and going against the public and doing opposite of what other people do. In other words, you buy near the bottom on knowledge and sell near the top on knowledge, while other people who just guess do the opposite. Time spent in the study of price, time and past market movements, will give you a rich reward. ...

I think that W.D.Gann is a very special case, so citing him is always controversial.

There is a number of serious traders (amongst them Ed Seykota, William Eckhardt and Jack D. Schwager) who have identified a large part of Gann's teachings as mumbo-jumbo. I am with them. If you really look at that stuff - angles, fans, squares of 9, astrology - it looks like as if the Renaissance had never taken place. Citing from one of his works:

" - The planet Jupiter is at 21 degrees gemini, which is 81 degrees in longitude from "0" the square of 9. Subtract 135 degrees from Jupiter gives 306 or 6 degrees Aquarius. This is why Soy Beans have met resistance so many times between 306 and 311 1/4...."

The "Law of Vibration" of W.D.Gann has a similar intellectual depth as the "Theory of Reflexivity" of George Soros. I do not see any law or any theory. But stocks vibrate, as their price action may have a cyclical component, and the stock market and the economy do interact in a way that creates feedback loops. W.D.Gann was a great forecaster and George Soros is a great trader.

This looks like a contradiction.

I heard the story of a trader who phoned to God by using a plastic antenna, before he put on a trade. This trader was extremely successful and assigned his success to the device he used for trading. His collegues, however, did not believe that it was the device, which was at the origin of his profits, but something else. But he himself was a believer. Would he have been able to teach his method to others?

So if many of the teachings of W.D.Gann belong to the realm of the occult, some of his findings certainly have a value. He had a great trading experience and probably was a master of applying psychology to the markets.

But the legacy of W.D.Gann are not his analytic methods. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of Gann Institutes to teach this pseudo-scientific nonsense. This may be profitable for the institutes, but I doubt that it will be profitable for the subscribers.

I am not at all astonished, if there is a bit of controversy, and I do not mind adding a bit.

Fat Tails,

I agree with you that Gann remains a mystical "phenomenon". And he probably used the occult to make it in the markets, or at least that's what we want to attribute him.

But he has also said a lot of things that has a lot of common sense, and that has nothing to do with the planets, the square of nine or the pyramids of Giza. The quote from above is a perfect example on something that still lasts, and is highly present.