F.B. THATCHER
The story of F.B. Thatcher came
to my attention in an article I found on the web. One can find the article by
doing a Google search for F.B. Thatcher. Below is the excerpt about Gann from
the book written by trader and author Larry Williams.
"As
a very young man, I followed the work of Edson Gould, who published an advisory
service called "Finding and Forecasts," How I wish I had paid more
attention to what Edson had to say. While it is true he had many arcane forms of
forecasting, he consistently relied on the action of the Federal Reserve Board
and what he called the 10-year pattern for stock prices.
Although
I did not know it at the time, I'd been handed, figuratively speaking, the keys
to the kingdom of stock market forecasting. The irony of the situation is that I
spent the next seven years trying to determine how to forecast stock market
prices out into the future. I studied the works of W.D. Gann as well as those of
R.N. Elliott, several leading astrologers, and so on, which all turned out to be
a waste of time. I was fortunate enough to eventually meet Gann's son, who was a
broker in New York City and who explained to me that his father was simply a
chartist. He asked why, if his dad was as good as everyone said, the son was
still "smiling and dialing," calling up customers to
trade." It seemed he was somewhat disturbed by his father's press-agentry,
as it had led many people to come to him seeking the holy grail. If there was
one, it was never passed on to the son.
At
that same time I also met F.B. Thatcher, who had been Gann's promoter and
advance man. He assured me in correspondence over the last five years of his
life that in fact Gann was just a good promoter, not necessarily a good stock
trader. F.B. made his own predictions, and they were not bad, but certainly not
great.
He did give me his
version of the genesis of the legend of Gann as a great forecaster. It all
began, he told me, with an article in the Ticker and Investment Digest that has
been reprinted many times since, where it was reported that Gann sold wheat at
the high tick, or price, of the day. Thatcher said they simply hired a good
press agent to place the story in the magazine for them. The magazine article
placement was accomplished over a dinner where there was some pretty serious
drinking as well some money sliding under the table, along with payment for a
large ad in the magazine.
I
did not know any of this at the time I began my search for something to predict
the future. Like everyone else, I believed what I had read about all the great
predictors. I wish now I had just stayed with the forecasting techniques that
Gould devised. His techniques have been not only more accurate than Gann's but
also a heck of a lot simpler to follow."
I
called Mr. Williams and learned a few more things about Thatcher. Thatcher
claimed to have been Gann's press-agent and was working for Gann at the time the
1909 Ticker article was published. He lived in Santa Rosa, CA and had been a subscriber to
a market newsletter put out in the late sixties and seventies by Williams.
Thatcher passed away around 1973.
Williams
never met Thatcher, but corresponded by letters. The gist of the letters
concerning Gann is
written above. Williams also told me that Thatcher was charged by Gann to attend
the seminars he was there to promote!
Thatcher
said Gann used a lot of arcane methods to forecast the markets. Some of them
make numerology look scientific.
Williams
also met Gann's son around the same time he knew Thatcher. He said Gann's son
told him his father had sold his business, at the same time, to three different
people. He said to Williams, "What does that tell you." John Gann died
in 1984.
None of the buyer's of Gann's business ever had any
forecasting fame. There was a fellow in St. Louis named Lerner that I talked to
once back in the late eighties. He is the owner that had lived in Scarsdale, NY
and moved to St. Louis. He put out a yearly forecast similar to Gann's 1920-1924
forecasts in "The Truth of the Stock Tape." It never achieved wide
distribution as far as I know. I have a few and they did not measure up to
Gann's legendary forecasts by any means.
Ed Lambert was a partner
with Gann at some point late in Gann's career. He sold the business to Billy
Jones in the late seventies. Jones is deceased, but his wife still runs the business selling the Gann
courses.
I
believe there was a lawyer on the West coast that also bought Gann's business,
but he did not stay with it more than a year.
Almost
twenty years after Thatcher's disclosure, we hear in an interview from a trader
who studied under Gann, that Gann wouldn't teach his partner Lambert how to trade
because he hadn't paid for the course. Sounds similar to Thatcher's story about
getting charged for seminars, doesn't it. He said Gann was a hard man. The
interview was done by a group from Australia and it is on one of the Australian
web sites. Neither of these recollections about Gann is very flattering.