Joseph E Granville Financier, investment professional, writer and lecturer Date of Birth: 20.08.1923 Country: USA

Joseph Granville: Biography of a Visionary Financier

Joseph Granville was a renowned financier, investment specialist, writer, and lecturer. He gained recognition for his ability to predict earthquakes, claiming to have foreseen six out of seven major earthquakes in recent times. However, he is most famous for popularizing the concept of "on balance volume," an approach to technical analysis that enables the prediction of future prices of securities, commodities, and other traded items based on historical price data.

In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Granville tirelessly argued that the financial market was heading towards an inevitable crash. Despite his influential reputation, his personal trading history, as reported by the "Hulbert Financial Digest," does not contain any particularly successful operations and is overall unimpressive. For the past 25 years, Granville has consistently ranked at the bottom of the HFD lists, losing an average of around 20 percent of his current assets per year.

Nevertheless, Granville enjoys a significant level of authority among investors, largely due to his showmanship. He always embellishes his performances with grandeur, such as rising from a coffin during one conference, or starting a client meeting by walking on water in a local pool. According to Robert Shiller's book "Irrational Exuberance," Granville was known for his extravagant behavior. Many remember his trained chimpanzee playing his signature tune, "The Bagholder's Blues," on the piano. His appearance as Moses, complete with a crown and tablets, was also unforgettable.

Granville's talents as a predictor are presented with utmost grandiosity. He claimed to have the ability to predict earthquakes and confidently told Time magazine that he would never make another serious mistake in the stock market. It is also known that he predicted himself to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Assessing Granville's individual talent is difficult, but as Shiller acknowledges, his reputation allows him to influence the economy. In fact, his speeches led to significant changes in the Dow Jones Index on April 22, 1980, and January 6, 1981.