The experts have come out in the usual ET fashion. Just cause you dont use it or even if you used it and it does not work for you its not garbage. Its a methodology that if studied may contribute something to your knowledge of the markets. Maybe you trade with a moving average or a stochastic which might not work with other traders. I bet out of 100 traders none trade exactly the same so one persons garbage might be anothers gold. There are certain concepts related to EW that I am mindful when I trade and have nothing to do with me counting 5 waves.
Tss tss you have 50% if you only talk about direction. EW is not interested in direction only but also in Target prediction. As I have never been able to apply the complex rules of EW I haven't been able to approve it. But I have my model and my model can be simplified to something like EW (with much fewer rules and waves calculated objectively with no guessing of where is wave 1 ) . The difference between my model and EW is that EW introduced golden ratio Add hoc whereas my model HAS NO Golden ratio as INPUT. So it was not biased saying by advance that there are golden ratios in market. It has been observed AFTERWARDS - so objectively - by mesuring the ratios between the points that model outputs. The ratios measured are very near multiple of golden ratios.
For example, I will take again what I have posted here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=14088 The "true" model predicted in theory for today's french cac40 2884.05 for the potential top (I would have taken Dow but it is closed today). In real it made 2884.86 ( http://www.boursorama.com/cours.phtml?symbole=1rPCAC ) Now lets look at multiple golden ratios of the first segment of the model we can see that this is near the first 5th wave of 2885.89: <IMG SRC=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=205467>
For the 7691 of Thursday Dow Jones calculated on the "true" model it is interesting to note that it has no golden ratio at all even on the 4 charts of hourly and daily scales. So golden ratios is rather an artefact of the "true" law or something even more transcendental since I don't pretend that there is not even a more "true" law than my current "true" law
Lets remember that reasonably successful trader, Paul Tudor Jones, makes use of EW. I respect all opinions, please respect mine: Elliott Wave Theory offers an objective methodology to analyze price movement in a usable (ie. to make money trading) way. If you take the time to really dig into the material available (it's hard and time consuming) it can be most enlightening and you will find out it is anything but subjective. Elliott had very specific rules, unfortunately they are somewhat cryptic and you need to be a bit intuitive. Probably the single biggest plus it has going for it is providing very low risk opportunities. A previous poster mentioned stops of .75 and profits of 1.5. That does sound like a tough way to do it. I promise you, the traders that earn 7 figures do not trade with a r/r of 2 to 1, more like 10 to 1. EW is not the only way to accomplish that of course, I'm just mentioning one example of EW's usefulness.
That previous poster can make it with 5-10 ES contracts @ a time (depending on my mental alertness) and Mr. Jones is what got me interested in Prechter and EW in the first place. People may also want to check out http://www.neowave.com/Advisors/neowave/ as an alternate to Prechter.