You could be to technical analysis what tweens are to texting, and it wouldn't make a lick of difference: You still wouldn't necessarily be trading at your fullest potential. The reason being: Without Elliott wave in your technical analysis toolbox, it's like looking at the world of opportunity through a narrow keyhole and ultimately missing the big picture.

The Wave Principle can help you unlock that door. Teaching you how to do it is the goal of the latest free educational report from our Club EWI resource center, titled "How the Wave Principle Can Improve Your Trading." In this six-page article, our editorial staff reveals these (and many more) ways in which the wave model makes up for the ways ordinary technical methods fall short:

• Technical studies can get you on board a trend, but the Wave Principe can say specifically at which point that trend has failed -- namely, when prices violate critical support or resistance levels in your price charts.
• Technical studies can identify the direction of a trend, but the Wave Principle can determine how high prices will rally or how low they will fall.
• Technical studies can recognize the strength of a trend, but the Wave Principle can discern the maturity of one; when it's time to take profits or raise protective stops.
• Technical studies can recognize the strength of a trend, but the Wave Principle can discern the maturity of one; when it's time to take profits or raise protective stops

A well-known business magazine recently published a story with this headline:

Stocks: The "Loss" Decade
A disastrous ten years for the stock market ends in just a month. Will the turning of a new decade change investors' luck?

One sentence from the story itself tells you most of what you need to know: "The ten years since Y2K are on track to produce the worst total returns for investors since the 1930s."

The proof of the market is in its charts. Professional market technicians know something you don't. A solid grasp of the most successful technical analysis methods can help you cut through the hype and give you the big-picture, unbiased perspective you need now more than ever. You can now download a FREE 50-page Technical Analysis Handbook from the largest independent technical analysis provider in the world. Learn more about technical analysis, and download your free 50-page ebook here.

Of course, no one should really be surprised by a story that says the stock indexes did poorly over the past decade. That's not news. The facts in the article more or less repeat what our own Elliott Wave Financial Forecast reported last March, complete with this chart:

When you're caught in the middle of a bad storm, you don't really care whether it's a tropical depression or a full-strength hurricane. You just know you're hanging on for dear life. The same idea applies to financial markets. When a market is trending up strongly, it's hard to tell whether it's just a bull market or a more dangerous financial mania.

The recent tremendous ride up for global and U.S. financial markets, including the Dow, looks and feels more like a mania than a mere bull, says Elliott Wave International analyst Peter Kendall. This distinction is important to recognize in the rising stage, because manias always result in a crash that takes them back beneath their starting point.