Popularity Of Certain Sports

Another social observation from Prechter is that certain sports are popular during bull markets--particularly basketball and baseball.  He sees the recent professional sporting craze as yet another sign that the cycle high is nearing.

"You see tremendous dominance by a particular popular team, team expansions, major stars, and the breaking of old statistics--like the home run record," he said. "This is a result of certain talented people feeding off of the rise of social mood and providing nearly superhuman performance."

In bear markets, these same aspects of the sport dwindle.

"That these sports today are providing breakthrough statistics supports the idea of an extreme as well," he says.

Looking at the sports analogy from a different angle, Prechter says baseball attendance records per team peaked out in 1993, along with the stock prices of card manufacturers such as Topps. These events in themselves could be a sort of technical bearish divergence within the social mood, suggesting that a change is in the wind.

"The lyrics in pop music are pretty ebullient these days in a different way from the '70s," he adds.

Overall, Prechter says, "these trends are coincident. It is not that one precedes another; they are a direct reflection of the same mood."

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