Robert Prechter was born in 1949. He attended Yale University on a full scholarship and received a B.A. in psychology in 1971. He played in a college band from 1969-1971 and became a professional musician for four years. In 1973, his band recorded an album.
In 1975, Prechter began his financial career by joining Merrill Lynch’s Market Analysis Department under the tutelage of Robert J. Farrell and in 1976 began issuing Elliott wave analysis of the financial markets. In 1979, Prechter founded Elliott Wave International and began publishing monthly market analysis under the masthead, The Elliott Wave Theorist. Elliott Wave International has become the world’s largest independent market analysis firm, employing a staff of analysts who apply the Wave Principle to all major markets around the world, around the clock.
Prechter served as a member of the board of the Market Technicians Association for nine years and as the MTA’s President in 1990-1991. He is a member of the International Federation of Technical Analysts (IFTA) and the American Association of Professional Technical Analysts (AAPTA). Prechter founded the Socionomics Institute, which hosted academic researchers at its Social Mood Summit from 2011 through 2016 and publishes the monthly Socionomist on society and culture.
Prechter has written twenty books on finance. Elliott Wave Principle has been translated into a dozen languages, and Conquer the Crash was a New York Times bestseller. Prechter has co-authored three scholarly papers on socionomics. He has made many speeches and media appearances around the world. His lectures on socionomics at Cambridge, Oxford, Trinity and The London School of Economics have been preserved on video. In 2008 and 2010, the Georgia legislature invited Prechter to testify before its Joint Economic Committee regarding the state’s real estate and economic crises. In 2009, EWI’s book-publishing division, New Classics Library, published Lewis Little’s The Theory of Elementary Waves, which dispenses with the magical theorizing of quantum physics by postulating a purely physical theory of sub-atomic physics.
Prechter’s articles and speeches on the Shakespeare authorship question have been presented in journals, newsletters and conferences since the 1990s. His 2021 bookset on Elizabethan authorship is posted at www.oxfordsvoices.com. Bob is a member of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and the Triple Nine Society.