The People Behind The McClellan Market Report

The McClellan Market Report and its companion Daily Edition are produced by the father and son team of Sherman McClellan and Tom McClellan. Both approach the task of stock market analysis from unconventional backgrounds.

Sherman

Sherman earned a degree in business administration and economics in college, but found out after graduation that the standard types of fundamental analysis taught did not provide enough of the answers concerning why and when stock market prices moved. Dissatisfaction with a number of methods for technical analysis led him to develop new techniques for assessing market conditions.

Sherman and his mathematician wife Marian developed the McClellan Oscillator and Summation Index in 1969. Many other traders, investors, and software developers have found these to be useful market timing tools. The Oscillator is derived from the number of advances and declines each day on the New York Stock Exchange. To learn more about these indicators, go to Oscillator.

Sherman brought these indicators to the public during guest appearances on Charting The Market, a technical analysis television program aired on KWHY in Los Angeles. As a result of these appearances, public interest in Sherman and Marian McClellan's new indicators increased. They were invited by the late Mr. P. N. Haurlan, publisher of the Trade Levels Report newsletter, to publish a book detailing their research. The book Patterns For Profit was the result of this effort.

Development of the McClellan Oscillator and Summation Index took place before access to computers was widely available. The first edition of their book included 8 years of data on the Oscillator and Summation Index portrayed in comparison to the NYSE Composite Index, and all data points were computed and plotted manually. For the purpose of verifying the signals given from NYSE data, they also calculated and graphed Oscillators and Summation Indices using AMEX advance/decline data and NYSE and AMEX up-volume/down-volume. This was before the Nasdaq even became a market. The amount of work required to perform the calculations this way limited the further development of market timing tools using these techniques. The development of personal computers opened up new capabilities for using the trend analysis techniques which are part of the McClellan Oscillator. Several popular market analysis software packages now include versions of the McClellan Oscillator and Summation Index. An updated edition of Patterns for Profit with 40 years of computer generated chart data is available from McClellan Financial Publications, Inc. You can read more about it at Products, and to order, go to Subscription.

Sherman's years of experience at tracking the movements of the financial markets enable him to interpret current market events in the context of similar events seen in many other market cycles. He now uses several new indicating tools which are more complex and more powerful for short term trading than the Oscillator and Summation Index alone. These new tools are also based upon exponential moving averages of data from advances and declines, up and down volume, and price movements.

Sherman is a member of the Market Technicians Association, and has conducted a number of seminars on the McClellan Oscillator and Summation Index and spoken to many investor groups around the country. Under the auspices of Sherman McClellan & Associates, he provides market timing advisory service to selected institutional clients. From 1976 to 2003, he and his family also owned and operated Admiral Plastics Corp., a custom plastic injection molding company in Los Angeles.

Tom

Sherman and Marian's son Tom McClellan has done extensive analytical spreadsheet development for the stock and commodities markets, including the synthesizing of the four year Presidential Cycle Pattern. He has fine tuned the rules for interrelationships between financial markets to provide leading indications for important market and economic data.

Tom is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where he studied aerospace engineering, and he served as an Army helicopter pilot for 11 years. He began his own study of market technical analysis while still in the Army, and discovered ways to expand the use of his parents' indicators to forecast future market turning points. Tom views the movements of prices in the financial market through the eyes of an engineer, which allows him to focus on what the data really say rather than interpreting events according to the same "conventional wisdom" used by other analysts. In 1993, he left the Army to join his father in pursuing a new career doing this type of analysis. Tom and Sherman spent the next 2 years refining their analysis techniques and laying groundwork.

In April 1995 they launched their newsletter, The McClellan Market Report, an 8 page report covering the stock, bond, and gold markets, which is published twice a month. They utilize the unique indicators they have developed to present their view of the market's structure as well as their forecasts for future trend direction and the timing of turning points. A Daily Edition was added in February 1998 to give subscribers daily updates on their indicators and also provide market position indications for stocks, bonds, XAU and gold. Their subscribers range from individual investors to professional fund managers. Tom serves as editor of both publications, and runs the newsletter business from its location in Lakewood, WA.

Their work has been repeatedly quoted in Barron's, and their market timing signals have ranked them in the top ten timers for both intermediate and long term by Timer Digest. Tom has made several appearances on CNBC, and Sherman was a frequent guest on WebFN.com/WCIU-TV Channel 26 in Chicago. In May 1999 Sherman and Tom were featured presenters at the Market Technicians Association annual meeting.