A Precise Market Forecast
The Associated Press, Tue 28 Mar 2000
NEW YORK (AP) ? Here's a market forecast in language clear as a child's primer, unencumbered by qualifications and unaccompanied by the usual, ``on the other hand' escape clause.
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, which stood at a record 1,527.46 at the close of last week's trading, will rise to 1,631 in late June or July, and then fall all the way to a low of 1,468 by October.
Soon after, it will begin a new ascent to 1,876 by November 2001. What happens then has yet to enter the sights of the daring forecaster, Robert Morrow, who thus puts his reputation at stake.
For Morrow to do so is not new.
In June 1987 he told viewers of the Nightly Business Report that the Dow Jones average would peak in August at 2,700. It peaked in August at 2,722. In November 1980, ``Money Magazine' readers were told that a bull market would begin in August 1982 when the S&P index was at 100. The bull market began in that month at 98.7.
Unlike so many other forecasters, Morrow feels so strongly about his system that he seeks always to put his forecast on record before the public, and in specific numbers. As a professional adviser to fiduciaries and other very large investors, he doesn't seek public acclaim. He's not even a stock market type. An engineer, he holds 37 technology patents.
Morrow's specialty is vibration analyses, the sort of testing necessary in the operation of large machinery, such as aircraft and turbines. Such things emit vibrations. So does the stock market.
While his work is highly technical and specially adapted to the marketplace, it is essentially based on these vibrations, which, it can be assumed, reflect patterns of human and financial behavior.
No, perhaps not the behavior of single individuals, such as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, but in very broad terms that Morrow the scientist then seeks to refine before putting himself at the mercy of the future.
He does so not solely for stocks, but for bonds, currencies and gold, among others, but it is the hard and fast numbers of the stock indices that best demonstrate his acumen.
During the period of his current forecast, the Dow Jones industrial average, which closed last week at 11,112.72 points, will reach 12,190 by July and then fall to 10,971 by October. Thereafter, it will begin an ascent through most of the year 2001 to a peak of 14,777 in November 2001. From there, you're on your own until he gets a clearer picture into the future.
Morrow, a grandfather, works out of a home office in Bradenton, Fla., issuing weekly and special faxes to his institutional clients and discussing the marketplace and his expectations by telephone.
While the long hours and highly technical work might sound tedious to many people, it has fascinated Morrow since the 1970s, when he was still working as an engineer.
It is not his sole interest. He has applied his technical knowledge to the analysis of tornadoes, and has filed a patent application for microforecasting their paths. Like machines and securities, he says, tornadoes have a particular signature that trained spotters can identify on radar, enabling them to specify precise areas as in immediate danger. |
