Stocks & Commodities V. 25:9 (60-66): Interview Henry Hank Pruden: What The Future Holds by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

Interview Henry Hank Pruden: What The Future Holds by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

Hank, why don’t you start by telling us how you got interested in the Wyckoff method.

What attracted me to the Wyckoff method can be summarized under my notions of Wyckoff the man, Wyckoff the method, and Wyckoff the mystique. An excellent article written by David Penn and published in your magazine a few years ago had a profile of Richard Wyckoff, and it was well done. I really thought he was an outstanding character in the history of technical analysis thinking. So early on I was attracted to Wyckoff. I thought he was a careful and responsible individual, in terms of taking the best practices on Wall Street and codifying them, as he said, to make up “the real rules of the game.”

There was another element that attracted me to the Wyckoff method. I had a friend who was an engineer with an airline in Lebanon before the conflict drove him and his family out of there. As an engineer, he found the Wyckoff method to be a solid methodology and he used it effectively. That drew me to taking the correspondence course from the Stock Market Institute (SMI) in the late 1970s. That’s pretty much what brought me into the method. I liked the method; it was very systematic. I liked the math, I liked that there were a number of schematics to follow as well as checklists and rules.