WD Gann: The Person & His Approach To Financial Markets

Financial speculation is a career path rich with history. Some of the greatest fortunes of the 20^th century were accumulated by traders such as George Soros, Paul Tudor Jones, and Jesse Livermore. The game of speculation has been largely transformed in form over the last 100 years, as traders no longer huddle around a machine, waiting for a ticker tape to emerge with the latest price ticks. Today, traders are spread all over the world receiving price ticks to their mobile phones and laptops anywhere an internet connection can be found.

However, the essential element of speculation has remained largely untouched, and this is man’s desire to make money. Few speculators have amassed as large of a fortune as WD Gann did during the early and mid-20^th century. Gann was born June 6, 1878 in Lufkin, Texas. Gann was born into a family of business sense, as his father was a well-known local cotton industrialist. In 1902, at the age of 24, Gann began his career as a trader, and that career did not end until Gann’s own life ended in 1955 at the age of 77.

Gann’s was a trailblazer in the arena of price analysis and technical chart analysis. His teachings largely remain in use today, as his Gann angles continue to find traction and acceptance in modern investment circles. Gann’s most popular discoveries were the Gann angles. Gann believed that Time and Price were the two essential elements of price prediction, and he believed that through the application of Geometric Angles, which came to be eventually be called the Gann Angles, that it was possible to forecast price direction in the stock or forex market.

Gann’s method of technical analysis was, of course, completely dependent on historical data, and historical results can never be considered as indicative of future results. Gann was most interested with identifying what he believed were high-probability price areas where supply and demand imbalance would shift and cause a change in the direction of price.

He would draw angles from all significant price pivot point swing highs and swing lows on a chart, and he would then use just one pivot point to draw an angle that moved up or down at a fixed rate of speed. The most common Gann Angles are:

In these calculations, T is the number of units of time, of course, and P is the number of units of price. The product N specifies what slope the Gann angle will take. In his own research, Gann believed that weekly Gann angles tended to be most reliable, and he actually recommended using weekly Gann Angles over Daily Gann Angles. An online free forex course may offer introductory education of Gann’s basic trading ideas.