Take a moment to look over your books about investing. Have any of them given you a successful method for making profits and reducing risks? Is there even one such book that has proven reliable over the years?

Alas, most investors would say "no." That\'s because so few investment books are "classic" in the true sense: For years investors keep buying the book, and they keep using the method to make the most of their opportunities.

Three decades years ago -- 1978 -- is one of the last times an investment book was written that is worthy of being called "classic."

One of the two men who authored that book was a 26 year-old market analyst working at Merrill Lynch\'s headquarters on Wall Street. The young man had earned a lot of attention in a short time by using a forecasting tool that almost no one had heard of.

Yet his market forecasts were startlingly accurate: Robert Prechter was the young man\'s name, and he used a method called the "Elliott Wave Principle."

A. J. Frost was one of the few other financial professionals who used the Wave Principle. In a distinguished 20-year career, Frost had likewise made many astonishingly accurate forecasts. His colleagues regarded him as the consummate technical analyst.

Frost and Prechter met in May of 1977 and became fast friends. Eighteen months later, they published Elliott Wave Principle - Key to Market Behavior. The Dow Industrials stood at 790. But the brash forecast in this new book called for a Great Bull Market. It became a run-away best seller.

Three decades is enough time for investors to deem a book about an investment method as "classic," and surely the jury is in on this one: Elliott Wave Principle is now published in seven languages, and continues to sell thousands of copies every year. In Europe, Asia and the Americas, literally millions of investors worldwide use or recognize the Elliott Wave method for profitable investing.