The most important thing that Ehlers should have focused, he simply forgot or ignored. The book fails to show real life examples with buy-sell signals using the indicator. It goes on and on along the theoretical lines of cycle analysis and it stays at that throughout the book.
It would have been much more entertaining to explain the indicator and show real life examples. But from my experience as a researcher and writer of research articles, people from this field tend to embelish and emphasize the theoretical size while completely ignoring the pure and simple aspects.
A simple cycle analysis done with moving average detrending as explained by Pring is much easier. Also, a simple look at the charts and the drawing of a simple cycle lines is all that it takes to show you the turning points.
The first edition of this book is still the clearest and most concise discussion of applying cycles theory to markets I've ever read. This new edition retains all of the content of the first edition, but updates it with a lot of new and additional information from Ehlers' recent research into cycles and his development of trading indicators and tools.
Many are familiar with the J.M. Hurst classic: "The Profit Magic of Stock Transaction Timing". Ehlers goes far beyond Hurst's pioneering work. Ehlers is an original thinker, applying new techniques and research using MESA to the market. Hurst was using a multi-million dollar mainframe in the 60's .... all of us have 10,000X more computer power sitting on our desktops than Hurst had .... Ehlers techniques can help the serious trader and investor turn all that "horsepower" loose on the market today, making it accessible to even us small traders.
Hurst was also constrained to using Fourier Analysis for cycles detection .... Ehlers' MESA overcomes the need of Fourier for long data spans to compute cyclic content.
If you're serious about the markets, this book needs to be part of your library .... along with Ehlers other book: "Rocket Science For Traders"