А. J. Frost on Hamilton Bolton
Hamilton Boltonwho his friends called Hammy, was a genius. When Bolton wrote the university entrance exam, he received the highest math score ever obtained in the province of Quebec. He studied economics and math at McGill University before taking a Master of Business Administration course at Harvard. He then joined Wood Gundy, performing analysis and preparing reports for that firm.
Brand genius
One of the top sales managers at Wood Gundy was Maurice Trembley, who recognized Hammy's genius. After a brief acquaintance, Trembley suggested the two of them set up a business as investment consultants and portfolio investment managers, with Trembley arranging for Bolton to manage the actual accounts. Bolton agreed, and in 1946 Bolton Tremblay, Inc.. Was founded in Montreal, with Bolton as president. Bolton primarily served as editor-in-chief of the Bank Credit Analyst firm Bolton-Tremblay; it was a publication with monthly market commentary trends and forces that soon gained the respect of the financial community.
A few years before, R. N. Elliott had published a series of articles in Financial World magazine. The relationship between the Wave Principle and the Fibonacci sequence of numbers was suggested to Elliott shortly thereafter by Bolton's friend Charles J. Collins of Detroit. This combination of ideas touched a sensitive string in Bolton. After empirically testing these ideas, he began publishing his own work on Wave Analysis as a annual addendum to his The Bank Credit Analyst.
As far as I know, Bolton met with R. N. Elliott only once, briefly, just before Elliott's death. The meeting was not very productive, as Elliott was by this time very ill and his response was far from optimal.
I was fortunate enough to be one of Hammie's partners for about two and a half years, but I left the firm at the end of 1966. During that time we spent many hours together and discussed "Elliott" both in the office and at his home.
I'm Hamilton Bolton.
I am often asked: what sort of man was Bolton? Let me just say that he was natural and friendly, but was a bit of a hermit. He loved solitude to listen to good music and his own self. He loved silence and had no problem in shutting himself off from the world completely. He also possessed a sense of humor. When a female analyst once asked him what was the one thing he would dream of having on a desert island, Bolton replied, "Barron.
Bolton had a remarkable sense of self-control. Once, returning from Bermuda in the spring of 1961, he wrote the full text (not verbatim) of the next BCA publication in three and a half hours. His writing style was rapid and sketchy and difficult to read, but his secretary Claire Chartrand honestly transcribed his notes. When Bolton was engaged in proofreading, he never had to change a single word. It seemed to me that when he wrote about the market, he was actually in a trance.. His immersion and concentration was incredible.
Hammie was not religious in the traditional sense of the word, but was in awe of nature and its law. He believed that the marketplace had its own law, and, he said, it was unyielding in its actions. I found that Bolton's interest in nature and the stock market was a process of unlocking the mystery. Hammy often said in private conversations that market and economic cycles of optimism and pessimism reflect Fibonacci ratios, which in turn are related to the "spirit of nature." He once said: "If you follow the Law, it will keep you, and there is no third personality between you and the Law." I once asked him if he thought Man was meant to grow in accordance with this Law. He said yes, and the main mystery is to know him. He never thought there was just a one-time opportunity to embrace this Law; it has always been with us, and gives us the opportunity to recognize it whenever we approach it. Law and order was the cornerstone of Bolton's philosophy of life.
Bolton had many friends and acquaintances throughout the world, especially in the United States, and was very active in his profession. He was Founding Director of the Montreal Institute of Investment Analysts и President of the National Federation of Societies of Financial Analysts (later known as the Federation of Financial Analysts, or FAF) from 1959-1960 (in its 13th year of operation) and remained its director for several years thereafter. Bolton was also an associate editor of The Financial Analysts Journal and a board member of the Beloit Financial Analysts Seminars. Fortune magazine ranked him as one of the world's greatest analysts, and his firm raised a total of three hundred million dollars in capital. Although his primary work was bank loan statistics, invariably after a 45-minute speech, the first question from the audience was about "Elliott."
Hammie had called the market target with a margin of error of a few points three times in the years before the events themselves and had "caught" all the important reversals except the 1962 rout. In fact, he had claimed the decline a year or two before and had labeled one of his charts with the word "PANIC", but when the reversal came, he was busy with FAF business and missed it. This omission almost broke him mentally, especially because he saw it coming long before the event itself.
For such a brief career, Bolton accomplished a great deal. In the field of fundamental analysis, he invented the ratio "debit/suede". and was a pioneer in the study of the relationship between bank credit and the stock market. In the field of technical analysis, he kept Elliott's Wave Principle alive. He did not wait for the Wave Principle to "get out" as this great achievement was Robert Prechter's gift to the entire world of financial analysts. However, Bolton showed great courage in defending this technical approach to the market at a time when such methods were viewed as nonsense by most of the financial establishment.
In the spring of 1967 Bolton visited me at my home in Manotick, Ontario and stayed with me all weekend. He was ill, but I did not get a sense of how ill he was. However, I got the impression that one of his partners was pressuring him to do nothing but bank loan analysis and "fundamentals" and forget about Elliott. Bolton cheerfully ignored this advice and discussed the Wave Principle with his usual enthusiasm during the two and a half days we were together. In fact, as he recounted on March 29, 1967, in a letter written to Collins (which Robert has included in this book), he was just getting excited about forming a group of Wave Principle intellectuals for the purpose of researching and refining the theory to make it more scientific.
Sadly, those were Bolton's last days. He flew to Bermuda the following weekend, and on April 5, at age 53, still young, he died.
А. J. Frost, 1993.