Richard Wyckoff
Richard Demille Wyckoff was an American stock market investor and the founder of the Magazine of Wall Street and Stock Market Technique.
Life and career
Richard Wyckoff was the son of Walter Wychoff.Walter was a financial media publisher and financier, the same industry Richard would enter during his career.
Walter contracted architect Chester A. Patterson and landscape designer Clarence Fowler to build a 7600 square foot mansion on a 10-acre estate, dubbed “Twin Lindens”, next to Alfred P. Sloan’s home in a wealthy part of New York.
Richard later inherited this property from his father.
Wyckoff founded The Magazine of Wall Street in 1907 and edited the Stock Market Technique.
Wyckoff educated the public about trading and its pitfalls, publishing exposés such as “Bucket Shops and How to Avoid Them”, which were run in New York's The Saturday Evening Post starting in 1922.
In 1928, Wyckoff lost control of The Magazine of Wall Street to his second wife, Cecelia Shear, receiving $500,000 in bonds after a publicized dispute where Wyckoff charged that she had wrested control of the Magazine of Wall Street from him by "cajolery."
Wyckoff died on March 7, 1934, in Sacramento, California. His body was taken to a funeral chapel in Brooklyn, New York.
Wyckoff method
Wyckoff wrote about numerous trading techniques. These techniques evolved and, at times, contradicted one another throughout his decades of published works; including books, articles, and interviews. For example: Wyckoff at one point criticized charts and held that tape reading was a superior method to trading, but later admitted that he changed his mind over time.Towards the end of his life, Wyckoff sold a multi-part correspondence course on the method he claimed to use to trade speculative financial assets. The course material was leased, not sold, at a cost of approximately $10,000 for the first, 400-page, part of the course.
Since then, this method has been dubbed “The Wyckoff Method” or “The Wyckoff Theory”. Wyckoff’s course focused on price action and some aspects of volume analysis; although Wyckoff stated that a thorough look into his style of volume analysis required an additional work, which he did not live to publish. Part of the instructional course did not disclose key details of his method of price-volume analysis, instead upselling the reader on an additional subscription service whereupon the necessary analysis would be mailed out instead.
Wyckoff stated repeatedly in his works that his method of trading is subjective and cannot be reduced to “mechanical” or mathematical means, which may help explain the contradictions and ambiguities throughout his own texts, including those within the aforementioned course. As a consequence of the Wyckoff Method’s subjectivity, contradictions, and lack of completeness, it is not possible to objectively measure its efficacy and this, thereby, may help explain why peer-reviewed and falsifiable research into its efficacy is almost non-existent. Limited published research on very specific aspects of the broader Wyckoff Method may cite—not Wyckoff’s own published materials—but the derivative materials composed by his later followers and proponents. Such derivative methods are generally dubbed “Wyckoff 2.0” in order to distinguish them from Wyckoff’s own works. Researchers may erroneously conflate Wyckoff 2.0 with the original Wyckoff Method, even though such derivative methods may not accurately mirror Richard Wyckoff’s original information.
Selected Works
Richard Wyckoff authored several books on stock market trading and technical analysis, including:Studies in Tape ReadingHow I Trade and Invest in Stocks and BondsStock Market Technique- ''Jesse Livermore's Methods of Trading in Stocks''