Robert Prechter

In 2014 at the IFTA Conference in London Prechter was created a Fellow of the UK Society of Technical Analysts in recognition of his lifetime contributions to Technical Analysis.

While Prechter has his admirers, he has been criticized by media and pundits for his long term record. For example, The Wall Street Journal ran a page one article in August 1993 with the headline, "Robert Prechter sees his 3600 on the Dow – But 6 years late," in reference to Prechter's 1987 forecast for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Technical analyst David Aronson wrote:

Still, not all the popular exposure to Elliott wave analysis was the result of Prechter's deliberate efforts. In the few years before and after 1987, media coverage inflated Prechter's "guru" status to extremes, including the assertion that his forecasts could single-handedly "cause" the stock market to rise or fall. In the months after Black Monday in October 1987, subscriptions to Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist surged to some 20,000. That number declined in the early 1990s (as did the subscription levels of most other financial publishers), though "Prechter has done more to popularize and spread Elliott's philosophy than anyone else."

His visibility increased further after he won the U.S. Trading Championship in 1984, with a then-record 444% return in a monitored options trading account. He was profiled in many financial and business publications and named "Guru of the Decade" by the Financial News Network (now CNBC) for the 1980s.

In 1979 Prechter left Merrill Lynch and published the first subscription issue of the Elliott Wave Theorist. The 1970s had been very bullish years in the gold market but mostly bearish for stocks, yet his Elliott wave analysis called for a long-term reversal lower in gold (February 1980) and a long-term "super bull market underway" in stocks (October 1982). Because these forecasts proved mostly correct—especially for the stock indexes—Prechter's following grew.

In 1979, Prechter postulated that social mood drives financial, macroeconomic and political behavior, in contrast to the conventional notion that such events drive social mood. His description of social mood as the driver of cultural trends reached a national audience in a 1985 cover article in Barron's. Prechter coined the term "socionomics" and in 1999 published an exposition of socionomic theory, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior. In 2003, he published an anthology of empirical work in the field, Pioneering Studies in Socionomics.

Prechter attended Yale University and graduated with a B.A. degree in psychology in 1971. He became a drummer for his rock band throughout circa early 1970s. His career as an analyst began when he joined Merrill Lynch as a market technician in 1975, where he learned much about the trade from Merrill's Chief Market Strategist, Robert Farrell (June 1982). There Prechter also learned of Ralph Nelson Elliott and the Elliott wave principle and was deeply intrigued:

Robert R. Prechter Jr. (born March 25, 1949) is an American financial author, and stock market analyst, known for his financial forecasts using the Elliott Wave Principle. Prechter is an author and co-author of 14 books, and editor of 2 books, and his book Conquer the Crash was a New York Times bestseller in 2002. He also has published monthly financial commentary in the newsletter The Elliott Wave Theorist since 1979, and is the founder of Elliott Wave International and New Classics Library. Prechter served on the board of the CMT Association for nine years, and as its president in 1990–1991. He has been a member of Mensa and Intertel. In recent years Prechter has supported the study of socionomics, a theory about human social behavior.

Much of Prechter's career as a publisher includes his efforts to re-introduce R.N. Elliott's wave principle to investors. He compiled and republished all of Elliott's available writings, including the 1938 "Wave Principle," and the "Interpretive" and "Forecast" letters (1938–1946). Prechter also published a brief biography of Elliott and the collected Elliott wave writings of the few technicians who practiced wave analysis in the 1950s and 1960s (Charles Collins, Hamilton Bolton, A.J. Frost, Richard Russell).