But I finally dug around in the New York Public Library and found a catalog card listing a copy of them on microfilm and had photocopies made.
In the few years before and after 1987, media coverage inflated Prechter's "guru" status to extremes, including the assertion that his forecasts could single-handedly "cause" the stock market to rise or fall.
That number declined in the early 1990s (as did the subscription levels of most other financial publishers), though "Prechter has done more to popularize and spread Elliott's philosophy than anyone else.
[21] His description of social mood as the driver of cultural trends reached a national audience in a 1985 cover article in Barron's.
[36] The conferences have included presentations from academics, authors and financial professionals such as Richard L. Peterson, Tobias Preis, Johan Bollen, Michelle Baddeley, Todd Harrison and Robert Prechter.
[37] Technical analyst David Aronson wrote: The Elliott Wave Principle, as popularly practiced, is not a legitimate theory, but a story, and a compelling one that is eloquently told by Robert Prechter.
The account is especially persuasive because EWP has the seemingly remarkable ability to fit any segment of market history down to its most minute fluctuations.
I contend this is made possible by the method's loosely defined rules and the ability to postulate a large number of nested waves of varying magnitude.
This gives the Elliott analyst the same freedom and flexibility that allowed pre-Copernican astronomers to explain all observed planet movements even though their underlying theory of an Earth-centered universe was wrong.