PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM
MEETS STOCK MARKET ASTROLOGY
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Just when you thought every system for psyching out the stock market had been tried, here comes a new one. Would you believe a scheme that leaves out the bears and only takes in the bulls and... the cows?!
Legendary mutual fund manager Peter Lynch has said, "Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon." Well, no one will fault this system for violating that principle. It's like this. Cows in a herd appear to deposit their, well... cow chips... in a random pattern in their grazing field. The operative word is "appear." The reality is quite different -- and surprising.
Use your crayon to make a map of the distribution of cow chips in an area -- maybe an area you're familiar with. It turns out that the pattern clusters around a Fibonacci spiral. You know the Fibonacci spiral because you've seen it in Romanesco broccoli. Before you object, let me tell you that it's not enough to look at the herd's habitat from above. You can leave your crayon behind now -- we're moving into new territory. The pattern is actually three-dimensional. What you find on the ground is only a flat projection.
Think of a "constellation" in the sky. The pattern you see is only in your mind. The stars are really at different distances from the earth. If you could travel to the "center" of the constellation, you would find that you have passed some stars and left them behind while others are still ahead of you.
Same thing on the ground. If cows could fly, God forbid, or be suspended in space, their pies would form a three-dimensional Fibonacci spiral. Yes, I know -- you have to sit down and scratch your head for a while and let it sink in. It's not what you expected. Now here is the interesting part.
To a large extent the group personality of the herd determines the angle at which the ground cuts across that three-dimensional spiral. A different herd would give you a different cow-chip picture, just as looking at the stars in one of "our" constellations from a planet in another solar system would give you a different constellation -- you'd be looking from a different angle.
Okay, so the core personality of a herd of cows is printing a pattern on the ground just as surely as the core personality of a group of trees produces a certain distribution of seedlings around them. Certainly no one would argue with that. When viewing these patterns, therefore, we can extract meaning from them, decode them, read them as the ancients read sheep entrails and dreams -- and the stars, of course. The difference, you understand, is that here we are dealing with scientific facts.
Many seemingly random patterns are actually projections of highly organized systems. It is their "projection on a plane," so to speak, that makes them unrecognizable to someone who doesn't have the key, just as a map of our constellations would look like a set of meaningless doodles to a resident of another planet elsewhere in the galaxy. Now it turns out that these highly organized systems project many patterns. Some of them show up in weather, some in demographics, others in accident statistics, in market movements, and, yes, in the layout of cowpies in a field. The great discovery is that they are all related. And if you know the conversion formula... well, now you are beginning to get the picture.
As you might guess, this formula is not shareware. And it is certainly not freeware! In fact, there are some among those who have it who believe that it's worth an arm and a leg, maybe more. This is serious business because it comes down to an opportunity to wield enormous power. All is not lost, however. You can have access to this great secret. Indirectly, that is.
You can have access to the filtered, refined and, yes, deodorized information -- the bottom line that you need, without all the equations and complex software that it takes to make the relevant conversions, to say nothing of the work of assembling all the raw data that goes into the calculations. You can have it for a song, or nearly so, say the publishers of the Brown Chip Theory Newsletter. This monthly compendium of reports and recommendations claims to bring you the most sophisticated market intelligence available from any source. The fact that it is based on fresh data collected from scientifically selected free-range herds (no feed lots) in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas only makes it that much more powerful.
If there is any validity to the hermetic dictum, "As above, so below," the arrangement of the heavens and the workings of the Invisible Hand are literally mirrored on the ground, courtesy of our bovine brothers and sisters. For the investor, however, the ultimate question has to be always: "Will this make me money?" Some purveyors of market intelligence would counter with traditional obliqueness and ask, "Does a bear shit in the woods?" As between bulls and bears, the Brown Chip Theory answers only for the bulls. The age-old question about bears will have to find support from another theory. What is certain without question is that the bulls -- and the cows -- always do it in the pasture, and for our purpose that's the only thing that counts. In this view of the world, when the chips are down things may be looking up.
If you are tempted to subscribe to the Brown Chip Theory Newsletter based on what you've read so far, you might consider holding off until you get a feel for the basic stuff that underlies it all. You can even take your crayons. Go out to the nearest pasture and take a stroll through a serving of cowpies a la Fibonacci. Just don't step in them. You could be erasing valuable data.
The Brown Chip Theory Newsletter, P.O. Box 3508, Dallas, TX 76005-3508.
$350/yr. No manual, no video, no audio tape, no introductory baloney, no discounts, no charter memberships, no premiums, no freebies, no hotline, no bull. Sample issue $30.
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