Is Elliott’s a mechanical system?
Not really. What we’re dealing with here is the behavior of people. If the tools you work with measure something other than the behavior of people, you’ll be removed from the reality of what’s going on. One of the biggest failures, in terms of approaching the stock market, is to assume that the market is mechanical in the sense that outside action causes market reaction, such as the idea that the market “responds” to Fed policy or the trade balance or political decisions. Others have tried to reduce it to a sum of periodic sine waves, but always find that it cannot be done, because the market is not a time-repetitive machine in its essence.
