Harry Dent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harry S. Dent, Jr. is an American economist and writer. His most well-known book, The Roaring 2000s, appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List. Dent is known to espouse a philosophy of demographic economics.

Dent received his B.A. from the University of South Carolina. He earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar.

Dent is the Chief Economist for a Tampa, Florida investment firm. Dent is also the president and founder of the H.S. Dent Foundation.

Dent writes an investment newsletter and has written six books, of which the two most recent have been bestsellers:

The Next Great Bubble Boom (2004)
The Roaring 2000s Investor (1999)
The Roaring 2000s (1998)
The Great Jobs Ahead (1995)
The Great Boom Ahead (1993)
Our Power to Predict (1989)

In the early 1990s, he predicted that the DOW would reach 10k. This prediction was met with much skepticism. In 2000, he predicted that the DOW would reach 40k, a prediction which was repeated in and his 2004 book. In his book, he also predicted the Nasdaq will reach 13-20k. In January 2006, he predicted that the DOW would reach 14-15,000 by the end of the year. By 12th October, it stood at 11,948 - an advance of about 8% since July 2006. It would need to rise a further 17.2% for the lower range of Dent's 2006 target to be hit.

Dent makes heavy use of charts, cycles and trends apart from his demographic theories in predicting future economic and stock cycles. His work is primarily based on the asumption that most long term stock market performance can be explained by studying long term trends and charts from the past. His critics question the assumption that clues to all major stock market events can be found in the relatively short history of well functioning stock markets in the world. His work has also been criticised for heavy use of data dredging- where it is easy to find patterns in past data and assign predictive powers to them when many such patterns occur in every data collection purely by chance.

While Dent's accuracy in calling long term demographic impact is impressive, his record on calling short term stock market behaviour is patchy, as shown in his recent backtracking on his original predictions of Dow 40,000. In November 2006, Dent made a dramatic change to his forecast for the new 'bubble', now estimating the Dow topping at 20,000 and the Nasdaq at 5,000 by late 2009. The key reasons cited by him were geopolitical tensions.