When you’re setting stop losses or riding market trends, you probably don’t think about Richard Wyckoff. Yet, the basic trading principles we follow today owe a lot to him. Wyckoff is considered one of the first educators in the stock market world. In 1907, he launched The Magazine of Wall Street, and by 1922, he was writing a column on trading for The Saturday Evening Post, sharing his experiences and warning against common mistakes. He even published one of the first textbooks - The Course in Stock Market Science and Technique.

Back then, traders had no choice but to be self-taught and discover market rules on their own. Wyckoff was not only studying the market himself, but he was also closely connected with successful traders and investors. One of them was Jesse Livermore, whose opinion he valued highly. By gathering knowledge and using his own experience, Wyckoff developed his own trading method (which we now call the Wyckoff Method), established several market laws, laid the foundation for chart analysis, and popularized key trading principles. For example, he highlighted the importance of stop losses and risk management.

Today, Wyckoff’s insights seem like common sense. For instance, it's obvious that if demand increases, prices go up, and if demand decreases, prices fall. But in the early 20th century, this was groundbreaking!

Wyckoff was the one who identified the pattern that now also seems obvious: an uptrend is preceded by a period of accumulation, and a downtrend by a period of distribution.

Just imagine, a hundred years ago, all this was revolutionary for traders. People like Wyckoff and Livermore laid the groundwork for what we now call technical analysis, risk management, swing trading, and low-risk strategies. We don’t just use their experience; we take it for granted. It’s become the basic foundation of sound trading, like the multiplication table is for math.