Predetermination
By Johannes Brilleman

Johannes is a graduate from Bradford University, School of Management and after a career of 15 years as Project Manager decided to start his own life as a Financial Day trader. Originally from the Netherlands, during his career he has been living in many different countries, including long stops in Singapore and in recent years the Russian Federation. His main interest is exploring the reason behind the cyclic nature of time. Johannes can be contacted at johannes.brilleman@gmail.com

Part 1: Cyclic Time on the Financial Markets

It is often said that history repeats itself. Why is it then, that we 'know' this, but, do not 'act upon it' ? In fact, what really happens is, that we recognise cyclic time only after certain events have taken place and we compare those events to something that has happened in the past. We do not know the reasons for these cycles, and frankly, we tend not to bother with understanding them.

This lack of 'drive' to find out whether time truly is cyclic and why, changes as soon as you start looking into Financial Trading. As soon as you realise that your bread and butter depends on understanding why the price of a company's stock goes up or down, you start to get interested in understanding ANY reason behind these price movements. Any type of forecasting that has a higher rate of success than 50%, is directly related to the income you have.

A typical Financial chart, showing the Euro — US Dollar exchange rate from 2010 until current, every green or red bar represents one week.

The longer you look at the typical financial charts that track the price movements of stocks, commodities, currency exchange rates, etc. The more you start seeing repetitions of patterns. This phenomenon is pretty widely known in the financial world, there are traders that use techniques of Fibonacci numbers, Gartley price patterns, Elliot Waves, Japanese Candle Sticks.... the list goes on and on. The idea behind all these methods is: when a certain pattern appears, there is a high chance of a certain movement of price directly afterwards. And therefore, you base your trading decision accordingly.

If this 'Pattern-trading' were to work to a statistically significant level, then all traders would be rich and everybody else would be trading too. This is not the case, however.

The patterns exist, and often have a favourable outcome to them. But, sometimes the outcome is not the one that is expected and it then depends on the trading skills of the trader to keep his losses to a minimum.

It is interesting to note at this point that most of the people who have studied these patterns of the financial markets and wrote books about them, rarely go into the subject of: 'Why'. Why do these patterns appear? It seems logical that if you understand why a pattern appears that you also understand what the outcome of the pattern will be.

If you were to ask a trader to name one historic figure that attempted to explain why these patterns appear on the charts, most likely you will receive the answer: 'W.D. Gann', (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Gann). His name is probably as widely used in the trading world as Fibonacci's. Gann was a trader from the early 1900's and wrote many books on his esoteric approach to forecasting the markets. His books however, are written in such a way that many people since have been breaking their heads on what it actually was that he was communicating. There are as many interpretations of his works as there are traders, and people who study his works divide themselves typically between: 'A student of Gann', and 'I have finally cracked Gann's secrets!'. Both categories of people refuse to explain the 'Why' of cyclic time.

In addition to Gann, the other person often cited with the discovery of cyclic time within the markets is 'N.D. Kondratiev', (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kondratiev), also giving no insights into the question of 'Why'.

So in other words: if you realise that understanding price patterns correlates to your income, and when you realise that nobody out there is satisfactory explaining why these patterns occur, you are pretty much left to your own research. Or, you drop the topic, of course.

I set out to do my own research. And I want to share my findings with you. Not from the perspective of trading the financial markets, however. What I want to do is create an awareness of cyclic time, and why, I believe, these cycles are occurring.

First of all, I will continue this writing with the help of 'financial trading'. I believe that the two-dimensional charts are like a hole in a big fence. Through these charts it is possible to see the workings of time in a very precise way.

One thing that is obviously clear from the works of W.D. Gann, is that he used astrology. Many of the drawings that he made in his works contain astrological symbols of planets and zodiac signs. I would love to include a picture in this article to demonstrate my point, but I am a bit wary of copyrights. The best thing to do is search the web for his famous 'Soya beans' chart from 1948. It clearly shows a line labelled 'Jupiter'.

So I had a starting point for my research. And anyone who has a bit of knowledge of Hindu Astrology will know that the relationship between the position of planets and the perceived value of commodities is being tracked already for many thousands of years. Why did we forget this? It weren't just the ancient Hindus, the Babylonians were making such observations too. You can look into a translation of the Babylonian work 'Enuma Anu Enlil', to find such passages as:

"If on the fifteenth or fourteenth of Nisannu (March/April) five disks come up: business will be reduced.

If with it a cloud bank lies on the right of the sun: the trade in barley and straw will expand.

Watch the opposition of the Pleiades and the moon, and all this will give you the proper answer."

With these hints of Astrology being behind the movement of prices, and with a hungry stomach in the background, I started to look for ANYTHING that I could find on this topic.