I pinched this link from Hotdog's sig....thanks Hotdog. I was...

I pinched this link from Hotdog's sig....thanks Hotdog. I was already aware of Kondratieffs work but this summarizes it nicely....It is fairly short and easy to understand and well worth a read.

http://www.kwaves.com/kond_overview.htm

Kondratieff believed that the long cycle in the market had 4 stages....unlike the 2 we understand of boom and bust. He saw that there were 2 differnt bulls and 2 different bears. These phases are referred to Spring, summer, autumn and winter.....summer and autumn are the bear phases. The summer phase is a stagflationary period like the 70s with winter being depressionary as per the 30s. He describes the winter as being the end of the cycle with a 3 year collapse followed by a 15 year deflationary perod.....it would seem that a winter phase is much more severe than a summer phase.

He published his work in 1926 based on data back to the late 1700's. He looked like a bit of a legend 3 years later when the 29 collapse occurred and lasted nearly 3 years...this was followed by 15 years of depression and war......

But here is the worrying thing. These cycles are very long and the DOW only listed around 1896. This was the very beginning of a spring period and to date we have only experienced one complete winter phase in the history of the DOW.....we are now in the second.

We refer often on the XJO thread to the 1907 and 1973 crashes....but these were both summer phases and were approximately equal in magnitude to this crash so far to date. True, the 1937 crash was also equal AND was in a winter phase but 37 came only a few years after the 29 collapse that Kondratieff describes as characteristic of the winter period. We have avoided such a collapse so far....but is that what we are in now ??

Kondratieff saw the winter phase a necessary clean out to form a base for the next period of growth.

But enough from me....check out the link.