Category Archives: Dow, Elliott and the TRIADS

These are the origins of the S-curve. S-curve fitting, a natural and fundamental approach to forecasting, is reliable with high confidence levels. Physicists have shown that everything in nature can be quantified, from matter to light. Spectacular consequences of putting natural law descriptions in a discrete form have been the subject of chaos and fractals. I had a chance to meet Theodore Modis, a physicist from Growth Dynamics Inc, recently in Vienna. Along with Alain Debecker, a mathematician from Lyon University, he wrote about the S-curve and the bridge between continuous and discrete formulations spanning 150 years of developments in mathematics. They also wrote about how it starts with Verhulst and finishes with Mandelbrot, intricately linking order with chaos. The paper also mention how chaos-like states can be expected before and after logistic growth ie historical picture is nothing but an alternation of logistic growth with periods of instability. The chaotic fluctuations belong to the end of a growth phase as much as to the beginning of the next one. A well established S-curve will point to the time when chaotic oscillations should be expected. What’s more interesting about this paper is that it sites the Kondratieff cycle (56 years) as a way to position growth periods.