Our Story

​​William Delbert Gann

The Legacy

WD Gann was an inspirational and legendary trader between 1900 - 1955. 

He was a prolific writer, an educator, a mesmerising form reader and exceptional trader.​
W.D. Gann was born in 1878 in Lufkin, Texas, the eldest of 11 children in an impoverished cotton-farming family. He neither graduated from grammar school nor attended high school as he was needed at home to work on the farm.  His education mainly came from the Bible (he was raised a Baptist), which he referred to constantly, and in the cotton warehouses, where he learned about commodities. Gann started his trading career working at a brokerage firm in Texarkana. 
In 1903, a year after he began trading in the stock and commodity markets, Gann moved to New York City to work at a Wall Street brokerage firm. He soon opened his own firm.  Gann was a great observer,  and observed the mistakes made by his clients and learned from them as he further developed his strategy.

In 1919, Gann began publishing a daily market letter called The Supply and Demand Newsletter,  covering stocks and commodities on a weekly basis and making yearly forecasts.  In 1923, he started another publication calledThe Busy Man’s Service,  in which he gave specific trading recommendations.  He also wrote a number of books throughout his life, including The Tunnel Thru the Air (a coded science fiction novel containing some of his core ideas) and45 Years In Wall Street.  Late in his career, he sold a ‘master course’ to private students for $5,000 a piece roughly equivalent to $50,000 today and not the Master Commodities course currently in the main stream.                                                                                                        

He was a believer in Cycles, and from his study of the bible often quoted the Book of Ecclesiastes: “That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new, under the sun.”  He believed everything occurring in markets has historical reference points.  Essentially, everything has happened before and will eventually repeat itself. He studied ancient geometry, astrology and numerology to investigate how market events and specific numbers repeated in various time cycles.

On the subject of CYCLES he says - “To make a success you must continue to study past records, because the market in the future will be a repetition of the past. If I have the data, I can tell by the study of cycles when a certain event will occur in the future. The limit of future predictions based on exact mathematical law is only restricted by lack of knowledge or correct data on past history to work from.”

Gann identified a number of cycles as importance; the 60-year cycle as being of major importance. He stated:"This is the greatest and most important cycle of all, which repeats every 60 years or at the end of the third 20-Year Cycle. You will see the importance of this by referring to the war period from 1861 to 1869 and the panic following 1869: also 60 years later – 1921 to 1929 – the greatest bull market in history and the greatest panic in history followed. This proves the accuracy and value of this great time period."

In November 1928, Gann issued an "Annual Forecast for 1929" which predicted the end of the great bull market of the 1920s on September 3, 1929 (the crash actually occurred on October 24) .He also referred to the 90-year cycle – and it is interesting that 2019 will be 90 years after the financial crisis of 1929, which itself occurred roughly 90 years after the Panic of 1837.  Gann's famous 144 count would have the 2019/20 time frame 144 months from the 2007 top.

Imagine if early 2020 was the top !