Hindenburg Omens are for kids. Here’s a tip of the top hat to Barry Ritholtz for unearthing this nineteenth-century great-grand-daddy among technical cycles:
(Click to enlarge)
That’s by one George Tritch. Who, for what it’s worth, appears to have been a big cheese in Denver’s German emigrant community at the time.
It’s indeed an interesting chart to point out, as Mr Tritch’s choice of years for ‘panics’ actually establishes a key point about chartism. It’s really rather backward-looking.
Note how this chart picks 1819, 1837, 1857 and 1873 as panic years, for example — indeed they all were, and as Mr Tritch no doubt remembered, either from his own lifetime or from folk memory. Hindsight bias, basically.
Of course, if you survived the Great Crash of ’99, lived through the Early Noughties Depression and sold off in 2007, you’ll probably have known all about and done well out of Mr Tritch’s tips, so go ahead and ignore our churlishness. (Wait — what?)
Tritch did kind of get it right about the actual Great Depression, though…
Related links:
Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone in 1910 – Marginal Revolution
Long Depression – Wikipedia
Drowning? No, just Elliott Waving – FT Alphaville