“ He expounded on a belief he held regarding the cycles of history and the markets. It was based, he said, on the formula for the circumference of a circle—the idea that 2πr might apply to the financial cycle—and, in combination with various Fibonacci fractal techniques, it had made him a lot of money. You could slice up history into what he called pi cycles, each lasting exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days, or 8.6 years. You could subdivide these, by the hours on a clock, say, or the signs of the zodiac, and detect mini-cycles of 8.6 months. He rattled off a series of inflectionary dates and occurrences: the Nikkei high, in late 1989; the ruble collapse, in mid-1998; the historically tight credit spreads in early 2007.
— Mike Paumgarten, “In For It”
