Foundation for the Study of Cycles

The Foundation for the Study of Cycles (FSC) is an international nonprofit organization that fosters, promotes, and conducts scientific research in respect to rhythmic and periodic fluctuations in any branch of science. It was incorporated on January 10, 1941 by Edward R. Dewey. It is currently under the directorship of Dr. Richard Smith. FSC published the Cycles Magazine from 1950 until 1997. In 2020, FSC relaunched the magazine as a quarterly publication. All FSC members are provided access to Cycles App, which according to the foundation, is "a tool that can decode cycles and apply cyclic analysis to detect dominant cycles in any dataset."

The FSC has been backed over the years by notable investors, like W. Clement Stone, Fidelity Investments, Coleman Co., and Paul Tudor Jones.

Origins The Foundation's roots are traced to the International Conference on Biological Cycles, held at Matamek, Quebec, Canada, during the last week of July 1931."The Inception of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles", Cycles – A Monthly Report, Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Vol. 2 (1951), p.188. The conference was organized and personally hosted by Copley Amory, described in the Foundation's own account as "an amateur biologist of note", at his summer estate, a rebuilt former Hudson's Bay Company trading post. More than eighty scientists and government officials from Europe and North America were invited to discuss cyclical phenomena in wildlife populations. The conference established a Permanent Committee, chaired by Amory, to continue the work.

In 1940, statistician Edward R. Dewey, then researching cyclical patterns in economic data, learned of the Matamek conference and of related cycle research in astronomy, and approached Amory to propose combining their work into a single, broader organization."A Library Visit of Importance", Cycles – A Monthly Report, Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Vol. 8 (March 1957), pp.63–64. The Permanent Committee was reorganized to include representation from economics and the physical sciences, and the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Inc. was incorporated in Connecticut on January 10, 1941, with Amory as founding chairman and Dewey as director. Amory personally funded the Foundation's launch with an initial gift of $500.

One of the Foundation's first undertakings, following Amory's suggestion, was compiling a directory of scientists worldwide who had contributed to the study of cycles, rhythms, and periodicities; this effort identified roughly 3,000 scientists working across some 34 distinct branches of science in which cyclical phenomena had been observed, including astronomy, climatology, dendrochronology, mammalogy, economics, and history.

Research activities and publications The Foundation conducted and compiled cycle research across a wide range of natural and social sciences, and developed statistical methods for isolating candidate periodicities in time-series data. Beginning in 1950, it issued a series of numbered "Technical Bulletins" documenting these methods in detail, including formulae, and fully worked numerical examples."Cycle Analysis: The Moving Average", Foundation for the Study of Cycles Technical Bulletin No. 4, reprinted in Cycles – A Monthly Report, Vol. 2 (1951), pp.297–328.

From June 1950 until 1997, the Foundation published a monthly bulletin titled Cycles (also referred to as Cycles Magazine), which combined technical research articles, member correspondence, book reviews, and reports on cycles identified across disciplines.

Leadership after Dewey Following Dewey's death in 1978, the Foundation continued operating from its offices in Irvine, California."Cycles give pattern to economy's turns", The Baltimore Sun, October 25, 1992. Richard Mogey served as the Foundation's Research Director, Executive Director, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Economist between 1988 and 1997, and was profiled in the press during this period as a leading contemporary authority on cycles research.

Financial scandal and collapse In the late 1990s, the Foundation's chairman was Martin A. Armstrong, an economic forecaster and head of Princeton Economics International. In September 1999, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Armstrong and his companies, alleging they had fraudulently sold billions of dollars in promissory notes to Japanese investors since 1996, resulting in investor losses approaching $1 billion. Armstrong was jailed for contempt of court in January 2000 and, after nearly seven years in custody, pleaded guilty in 2006 to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud."Armstrong admits Japanese fraud role", The Baltimore Sun, August 18, 2006. Republic New York Corp., whose securities division had assisted the scheme, separately pleaded guilty, and paid $606 million in restitution to defrauded investors.

The Foundation ceased active operations in the wake of Armstrong's arrest and Mogey's departure as Executive Director, and its records and research library passed into the custody of the Market Technicians Association (MTA, now the CMT Association).

Revival In the mid-2000s, researcher David Perales, with assistance from Mogey, discovered that the Foundation's federal tax-exempt status and Connecticut corporate charter had never been formally terminated, and moved to restore the original entity to active status rather than form a new organization. The revived Foundation sought the return of its former records and research materials from the MTA; MTA board member Sherman McClellan assisted in returning the Foundation's accounting records and research materials. The Foundation's printed library, including runs of Cycles magazine and related books, had been retained by the MTA and has since been administered together with the library of Baruch College in New York. During this period, the complete run of Cycles magazine, along with several related books, was preserved on microfiche, a preservation effort credited to Perales.

Mogey rejoined the Foundation as Director of Research and Chief Economist from 2004 to 2010.

The Foundation is currently led by Dr. Richard Smith. FSC relaunched Cycles as a quarterly publication in 2020, and members are provided access to the "Cycles App", a software tool for detecting dominant cycles in time-series data.

Notable affiliated researchers Over its history, the Foundation's directory, board, and contributor base included researchers such as Raymond Holder Wheeler, A. E. Douglass, Charles Elton, and Alexander Chizhevsky, among many others whose cycle research the Foundation compiled, cross-referenced, and published.

Critical reception The Foundation's approach to multi-cycle analysis has drawn criticism from some economists. Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard each critiqued Dewey's methodology and theoretical framework.

Foundation for the Study of Cycles

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