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Richard Wyckoff

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Richard Wyckoff
Richard Demille Wyckoff
Born(1873-11-02)November 2, 1873
DiedMarch 7, 1934(1934-03-07) (aged 60)
Sacramento, California, U.S.
Occupation(s)Stock market investor and editor
Spouse(s)Elsie Suydam
Cecelia G. Shear
Alma Weiss

Richard Demille Wyckoff (November 2, 1873 – March 7, 1934) was an American stock market investor and the founder of the Magazine of Wall Street and Stock Market Technique.

Early life

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Richard Wyckoff was the son of Walter Wychoff.[1]

Walter was a financial media publisher and financier, the same industry Richard would enter during his career.[2]

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 (Kings Point, Great Neck).[1][3][4]

Richard later inherited this property (also called the “Wyckoff Estate”) from his father.[1]

Career

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Wyckoff founded The Magazine of Wall Street in 1907 and edited the Stock Market Technique. 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.[5]

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.

Wyckoff Method

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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.[6][7][8][9][10]

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 (in 2025 inflation-adjusted USD).[11][12]

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.[9][10]

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.[6][7][9][10][13][14]

Author

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Richard Wyckoff authored several books on stock market trading and technical analysis, including:

  • Studies in Tape Reading
  • How I Trade and Invest in Stocks and Bonds
  • Stock Market Technique
  • Jesse Livermore's Methods of Trading in Stocks

Personal life

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Wyckoff charged in 1928 that his second wife, whom the media dubbed a prima donna of Wall Street, had wrested control of the Magazine of Wall Street from him by "cajolery." in an agreement by which he received half a million dollars of the magazine company's bonds.[5]

Death

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Wyckoff died on March 7, 1934, in Sacramento, California. His body was taken to a funeral chapel in Brooklyn, New York.[15]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c "Wychoff - Kings Point, Great Neck, L. I., N. Y." nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org. Retrieved 2025-06-17.
  2. ^ "University of Rochester House Data". lizzycarr.digitalscholar.rochester.edu. Archived from the original on 2025-01-29. Retrieved 2025-06-17.
  3. ^ "Wayback Machine" (PDF). spinzialongislandestates.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2024-01-27. Retrieved 2025-06-17.
  4. ^ Mateyunas, Paul J. (2007). North Shore Long Island : country houses, 1890-1950. Internet Archive. New York : Acanthus Press. ISBN 978-0-926494-37-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  5. ^ a b "Business & Finance: Wyckoff v. Wyckoff". Time. 1928-12-10. Archived from the original on 2025-04-24. Retrieved 2025-04-24.
  6. ^ a b Richard Demille Wyckoff (1910). Studies in Tape Reading. New York Public Library. Traders Press.
  7. ^ a b Wyckoff, Richard Demille (1983). How I trade and invest in stocks and bonds. Internet Archive. Fraser Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0-87034-069-7.
  8. ^ Wyckoff, Richard Demille (1968). Wall Street ventures and adventures through forty years. Internet Archive. New York, Greenwood Press.
  9. ^ a b c TheBullButCheR. The Richard D. Wyckoff Method Of Trading In Stocks.
  10. ^ a b c Wyckoff Method Of Tape Reading.
  11. ^ Woodward, Burton M. (1968). The Dow theory and the management of investments. George A. Smathers Libraries University of Florida.
  12. ^ "Wayback Machine". shapero.com. Archived from the original on 2025-11-09. Retrieved 2025-11-09.
  13. ^ Sharma, Monika. "Wyckoff Theory in the Mind of the Market: A Psychological and Structural Reappraisal". Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Management. 2024, 9(4) (e-ISSN: 2468-4376).
  14. ^ Pal, Jai (2024), Long Short-Term Memory Pattern Recognition in Currency Trading, arXiv, doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2403.18839, retrieved 2025-11-09
  15. ^ "Richard D. Wyckoff, Stock Market Authority, Dies". Brooklyn Eagle. 1934-03-09. p. 17.
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