Joseph Granville

Who was Joseph Granville?

Joseph Ensign Granville, often called Joe Granville, was a financial writer and investment speaker. He popularized the use of "on balance volume", a technique of technical analysis that attempts to predict future prices of stocks, commodities, and other financial assets traded on financial markets for which historical price and volume information is available.

Granville is probably best known for his bearish market calls during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when he claimed that the stock market was headed for imminent collapse. His overall track record, according to the Hulbert Financial Digest, is very poor.

The Granville Market Letter "is at the bottom of the Hulbert Financial Digest's rankings for performance over the past 25 years - having produced average losses of more than 20 percent per year on an annualized basis."

Granville was known as a great showman who would emerge from a coffin at an investment conference, or appear to walk across water when meeting clients. According to Robert Shiller in his book Irrational Exuberance

His investment seminars were bizarre extravaganzas, sometimes featuring a trained chimpanzee would could play Granville's theme song "The Bagholder's Blues," on piano. He once showed up at an investment seminar dressed as Moses, wearing a crown and carrying tablets. Granville made extravagant claims about his forecasting ability. He said he could predict earthquakes and once claimed to have predicted six of the past seven major world quakes. He was quoted by TIME Magazine as saying "I don't think that I will ever make a serious mistake in the stock market for the rest of my life," and he predicted that he would win the Nobel Prize in economics.