📖William Gann

Wisdom for Investing and Life

🌱 Beginner★★★★☆

Investment principles apply to life too.

💬

The principles that make you a great investor — patience, discipline, humility, and continuous learning — are the same principles that lead to a great life.

— 45 Years in Wall Street,1949

🏠 Everyday Analogy

A process is like a pilot checklist: discipline prevents simple mistakes when pressure rises and keeps outcomes more repeatable.

📖 Core Interpretation

W.D. Gann advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Character virtues drive success in investing and life.

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❓ Why It Matters

Without process, there is no reliable feedback loop. Structured execution and review improve decision quality over time.

🎯 How to Practice

Run a decision loop of research, thesis, execution, and post-mortem; document assumptions and update playbooks with evidence, not hindsight bias.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Having opinions without execution criteria
Reviewing outcomes but not decisions
Abandoning rules during volatility spikes

📚 Case Studies

1
Pre-Crash Dow Trend Reversal (1929)
Using Gann’s trend definition, a series of lower tops and lower bottoms on the Dow in late 1929 signaled a primary downtrend before the October crash.
✨ Outcome:An investor respecting the new downtrend would have exited early, avoiding the bulk of the crash losses.
2
Dot-Com Bubble Peak (2000)
The NASDAQ in early 2000 broke its prior swing lows, forming a clear downtrend per Gann’s rule of lower highs and lower lows after a parabolic rise.
✨ Outcome:Investors who sold when the trend reversed sidestepped years of heavy tech stock drawdowns.

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