2017 Speakers
Alan Hall is a regular contributor to The Socionomist. He began studying Elliott wave analysis and socionomics after meeting Robert Prechter in 1994. Hall’s grasp of socionomics made it easy for him to recognize the escalating housing mania, thus he closed his homebuilding business in 2004 and soon joined Elliott Wave International. Hall wrote the lead articles for the inaugural issues of The Socionomist in May and June 2009. Since then, his research has showcased the wide range and deep applicability of the socionomic perspective. He has also lectured on socionomics in the U.S. and Europe, and he has contributed to Global Market Perspective, The European Financial Forecast and The Elliott Wave Theorist.
Robert R. Prechter, CMT, is known for developing a theory of social causality called socionomics and for his long career applying and enhancing the Wave Principle, R.N. Elliott’s fractal model of financial pricing.
Prechter has made presentations on socionomic theory at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, MIT, Trinity College Dublin, Georgia Tech, SUNY and various academic and financial conferences. In 2005, Prechter created the Socionomics Institute, which is dedicated to research and the application of socionomics, and the Socionomics Foundation, which supports academic research in the field.
Prechter graduated from Yale University in 1971, joined the Market Analysis Department of Merrill Lynch in New York in 1975 and founded Elliott Wave International in 1979, where he has published monthly market analysis in The Elliott Wave Theorist. Prechter has served as a member of the board of the Market Technicians Association, as the MTA’s President in 1990-1991 and as a member of the advisory board of the MTA’s Educational Foundation. He is a member of the Triple Nine Society and the Shakespeare Oxford Society.
Prechter has authored, edited or contributed to 18 books. Elliott Wave Principle: Key to Market Behavior has been translated into a dozen languages, and Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression was a New York Times bestseller. His latest work, The Socionomic Theory of Finance, aims to replace conventional financial and macroeconomic theory with an internally and externally consistent paradigm based on socionomics.
Matt Lampert is the director of research at the Socionomics Institute. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and has spoken about socionomic theory throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is a board member of the Socionomics Foundation and editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine The Socionomist. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Sciences with funds from the National Science Foundation, and his work has been featured by USA Today, CNBC, the Associated Press and other popular news and scholarly publications.
Werner De Bondt, Ph.D., is one of the founders of behavioral finance and a pioneer in the growing field of social mood research. As the director of the Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at DePaul University in Chicago, Dr. De Bondt studies financial markets and the psychology of investors.
His research is interdisciplinary. He has examined key concepts of bounded rationality, e.g., people’s tendency to exaggerate the true impact of new information, their bent towards wishful thinking, or their biased perceptions of risk. Dr. De Bondt’s research has appeared in many scholarly journals, including The Journal of Finance, The European Economic Review and The American Economic Review.
Dr. De Bondt is a frequent speaker to academics and investment professionals worldwide. He holds degrees in economics, commercial engineering and public administration, as well as a Ph.D. in business administration from Cornell University. Dr. De Bondt has served as a professor at universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
Marah Boyesen began to integrate socionomics into her work with students in a private high school in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania after she read Robert Prechter’s Conquer the Crash. In turn, her students were very likely the first to formally study socionomics at the secondary level. During her 20-plus-year career as an educator and coach, Marah gained a reputation as a go-to source for teenagers seeking motivation, inspiration and guidance. Previously Marah spent time as an elite amateur cyclist, where she used sports psychology to advance her racing, competing in regional, national and international events. Marah also worked for an affiliate of Brain State Technologies, training clients in a state of the art neuro-technology. Marah received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from James Madison University.
Mark Buchanan, Ph.D., is a former editor at Nature and New Scientist and is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles published internationally. He currently writes columns for the financial media outlet Bloomberg View, as well as for Nature Physics. He has written two prize-nominated non-fiction books, Ubiquity: The Science of History and Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks. In 2009, he received the LaGrange Prize for writing on issues in complexity science. His most recent book, Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics, is available from Bloomsbury Press.
Johan Bollen, Ph.D., and Huina Mao, Ph.D., are the main authors of the groundbreaking study “Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market.” Their widely-reported research said, “The number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. A change in emotions expressed online would be followed between two and six days later by a move in the index, the researchers said, and this information let them predict its movements with 87.6 percent accuracy.”
Ken Olson, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of psychology at Fort Hays State University, where he directed the graduate program in clinical psychology from 1981-2010. He has authored 40 academic articles and numerous presentations at professional conferences. He is a licensed clinical psychologist who has treated patients and supervised clinical staff and interns in both public and private mental health agencies. He received the first research grant awarded by the Socionomics Foundation and has written about the personality basis of social mood and the relationship between homicide rates and social mood.