Here is a part from the article "Basketball and Bull Market" appeared in The Elliott wave Theorist on December 16, 1996:
"But basketball has a long history and is an intensely competitive enterprise. It is a field where performance is closely monitored and recorded. This examination of that history shows the dominant influence of social mood on an American sport. Basketball is a coincident reflection of the rising mood behind the bull market of the last century. The game’s structure, rules and fortunes have developed in a manner that is totally consistent with the ebb and flow of the bull market in stocks. By linking the peaks and troughs of the professional game to the same junctures in the stock market, this analysis will shed light on the way a bull market operates in the cultural realm.
When the market is rising, optimism is growing and people express that emotion by attending basketball games. Owners express it by starting teams and leagues. This report also reveals surprising consistencies in the play itself by exploring the sport’s propensity to crown the greatest teams and heroes at the most explosive points in the bull market as well as its regression to violence and chaos in bear markets.
The game’s long rise to prominence supports the case well. Professional basketball was born in 1896, the same year as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In that year, the Dow put in a low of 26.08, which has never been challenged. Over the last 100 years, the basketball season has correlated precisely with the best 6-month stretch for stock prices. The November to April period, pro basketball’s regular season, has an average gain of 2.6%, almost twice the average semi-annual gain of 1.34% since 1896. Basketball’s off-season is among the worst. Over the last century, May to October has produced a gain of just 0.5%."
Most people think that human achievements are placed only to physical capacity. I have found interactive visualization of world record for summer Olympic, you can see it here:
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Now what it is the link between world records and Elliott waves? Peter Kendall provides an explanation:
"How does a wave of mass emotion express itself in the performance of a single individual? As the center for the Boston Celtics in the 1960s, Bill Russell was the most valuable player on the best team in basketball history. In his autobiography, he offered some observations that might explain how a bull market game might manifest itself in the actions of solitary participants. He described the atmosphere of a big game as a kind of “spell” that “surrounded” fans, coaches, opposing players and “even the referees.” “To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks, and they had to be competitive. The Celtics could not do it alone…That mystical feeling usually came with the better teams in the league that were challenging us for the championship…It usually began when three or four of the ten guys on the floor would heat up; they would be catalysts, and they were almost always the stars in the league. If we were playing the Lakers, for example, (Jerry) West and (Elgin) Baylor and (Bob) Cousy or Sam (Jones) and I would be enough. The feeling would spread to the other guys and we’d all levitate. Then the game would just take off, and there’d be a natural ebb and flow that reminded you how rhythmic and musical basketball is supposed to be.
Russell says he never admitted it to his teammates, but, at such times, winning itself didn’t matter to him as much as reaching that higher plane. “On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won.”
Players at substantially lower levels of play have reported similar sensations. Essayist and schoolyard ballplayer John Boe wrote, “It is popular to talk about rhythm and flow in basketball. And when playing basketball, you indeed feel the rhythm, flow with the group mind. I play basketball in order to experience those moments when I feel in rhythm, and it is more a matter of the rhythm having me than of my having the rhythm.”
The structure of the game produces a “dance of ascendancy,” wrote George Kovacs in Hoops Zen. “The obvious advantages of basketball over other sports as a medium of spiritual self-development is the idea the ideal of upward striving…(an) unrestrained yet disciplined challenge of the mortal entity against gravity and other oppressive earthbound limitations. James Naismith’s notion of hanging a peach basket 10 feet off the ground to taunt and tantalize athletic pretenders was a stroke of genius in forcing hoopsters to elevate their endeavors and objectives as well. Thanks in considerable measure to ‘upward striving,’ no other sport, no other athletic activity perhaps no other human activity allows, encourages, enhances, necessitates the poetry, the poetic movement of the human body like hoops.” That ideal of upward striving, we contend, derives from social mood and is manifest also in rising stock prices."
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