W.D. Gann: Life, Books, Tools and the Cycle Forecasts Tested

William Delbert Gann (1878 to 1955) was an American stock and commodity trader and author from Lufkin, Texas, who tried to forecast markets with geometry, time cycles and astrology. His name survives in charting tools: the Gann fan, the Square of 9, the Square of 144 and the Gann box, each covered in its own guide linked below. His cycle forecasts are a different matter: the projections his followers drew from them, such as a crisis in 2019, did not happen.

Gann's life

Gann was born in Lufkin, Texas, on June 6, 1878, the first of eleven children in a poor cotton farming family. As a boy he left the cotton fields to sell newspapers and cigars on trains in Angelina County, where conversations with passengers drew him to finance. In the early 1900s he moved to New York and became a well-known stock and commodity trader. He was a devout Baptist, and his writing mixes market analysis with religion, mathematics and astrology.

He wrote both market forecasts and fiction. The Tunnel Thru' the Air (1927) is a near-future novel whose hero uses his reading of the Bible to anticipate a great depression; Gann predicted elsewhere that such a depression would begin in 1928 and end in 1932. His market books include The 1929 annual stock forecast (1928), 45 Years in Wall Street (1949) and How to make profits trading in commodities (1942, revised 1951). He died on June 18, 1955.

The Gann tools and where to learn each one

Gann's lasting influence is in a family of tools that relate price to time. They share one idea: price and time move in proportion, so angles, squares and boxes drawn from a major high or low can mark future support, resistance or turning dates. Our guides cover each one with its construction and its limits.

The geometry behind these tools is explained in our page on trading market geometry. The fan is the easiest place to start, because it reads like a set of trend lines.

Gann's time cycles, and what happened to the 2019 forecast

Gann looked for cycles that repeat over years and decades, and his followers have used them to project long-range turning points. Counted from 1929, a 90-year cycle pointed to a financial crisis in 2019. The count is a follower's, not a quotation from Gann: in April 2018, a user of the blogging platform Steemit published "2019 will be the Great Depression, according to the Gann theory?", which presents itself as an invitation to learn from the analysis of Alan Oliver, whom it calls an analyst of Gann theory. The post added 90 years to 1929, wrote that "Gann predicts the next economic crisis will take place in 2019", and ended with a hedge: "this is just a prediction and it may or may not happen." That year has passed, so it can be checked: in 2019 the S&P 500 rose 28.9%, its best year since 2013. On the dividend-adjusted monthly S&P 500 ETF series in the chart below, the 2019 return was 31.2% (our computation, December 2018 close to December 2019 close); the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust's January 2020 prospectus reports 31.25% for that year, on net asset value.

The same cycle has also been counted from a different starting point. In October 2022, a Gann analyst interviewed by MF Milano Finanza measured the 90-year cycle from the 1842 low to the 1932 low and projected the worst point of 2022 for November, followed by a new rise from 2023. On the same series, the lowest monthly low of 2022 came in October (our computation), and the 2023 return was 26.2% (our computation, December 2022 close to December 2023 close); the trust's January 2024 prospectus reports 26.12% for 2023, on net asset value.

For a general introduction to market cycles, including shorter cycles, see our cycles guide.

How to use Gann's work today

Treat the Gann tools as ways to mark levels and dates worth watching, not as forecasts. A Gann level that lines up with an obvious support, a prior high or a round number deserves attention; a Gann date with no price confirmation does not. No public, audited record of Gann's own trading results exists, and the precise fortunes attributed to him online have no primary source, so his reputation rests on his books and his tools rather than on a verified track record. His contemporary Jesse Livermore, born a year earlier, left a better documented record of both his gains and his losses. Other traders with documented results are on our list of the most successful stock traders and in the famous traders section.