Harry Dent

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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 received his B.A. from the University of South Carolina, where he graduated #1 in his class. 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 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. It ended 2006 at 12463, 11% below the lower end of his prediction. It ended 2007 at 13264, again significantly lower than Dent's revised prediction of 15000 by early 2008.

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 assumption 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.

He popularized the baby boomer age-wave theory^[1]. According to him, as a result of baby-boomers retiring, the stock-market should peak around until 2007 to 2009. It is based on his observation that the spending peaks around age 50 for individuals.

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.

Dent was born in 1950, according to his own website.

[edit] References

^ Siegel, Jeremy J. (June 21, 2002). Stocks for the Long Run : The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies, 3rd, New York: McGraw-Hill, 388. ISBN 978-0-07-137048-6.