Hank Pruden is an internationally- known educator and speculator. He is a professor in the School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California where he has been teaching for 20 years. Hank is more than a theoretician; having actively traded his own account for the past 26 years he has placed real equity at risk based upon the theories he teaches. His personal involvement in the market ensures that what he teaches is practical for the trader, and not only abstract academic theory.

He is also the Executive Director of the Institute of Technical Market Analysis (ITMA). At Golden Gate he developed the accredited courses in technical market analysis in 1976. Since then the curriculum has expanded to include advanced topics in technical analysis and trading. In his courses Hank emphasizes the psychology of trading as well as the use of technical analysis methods. He has published extensively in both areas.

Hank has mentored individuals and institutional traders in the field of technical analysis for many years. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the Technical Securities Analysts Association of San Francisco and is past president of that association. Hank was also on the Board of Directors of the MTA and has served as Vice Chair of the Americas with IFTA. For eleven years Hank was the editor of MTA Journal, the premier publication of technical analysts. From 1982 to 1993 he was a member of the Board of Trustees of Golden Gate University.

Hank completed his Ph.D. (with honors), at Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. He also holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s of Science degree from California State University, Chico.

Professor Pruden, currently on a year-long sabbatical from Golden Gate University, is a visiting professor/visiting scholar at Euromed-Marseille Ecole de Management in Marseille, France. In collaboration with other professors at Euromed-Marsaille, Hank has co-authored two articles. With Dr. Bernard Belletante, Hank published a realtime test of the Wyckoff method projecting a new bull move in the DJIA in the IFTA Journal. The Journal of Technical Analysis published his work with Dr. Bernard Paranque and Dr. Walter Baets.

While in France, Hank is acting as a roving ambassador of education for IFTA. He is working to develop courses and introduce technical analysis into colleges and universities and to assist individual technical societies with their educational offerings at the operational level. His objective is to identify what needs to be taught at these schools and how it should be taught in each of the individual countries, accounting for cultural differences. Hank will be traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East in the coming months to meet these objectives.

The roving ambassadorship is similar to a role Hank has fulfilled since 2000 in South and Central America ‘s financial communities. He helped to launch the Brazilian Technical Society and has been a keynote speaker in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Bilingual in Spanish, Hank has been able to address complex and sensitive financial and intercultural issues without the confusion or misunderstanding of translation

Educational Philosophy

For over a quarter of a century, Hank has taught technical analysis at the university level. A popular scholar, he has won multiple “best teacher and best scholar” awards based upon his ability to be easily understood by motivated beginners in finance and by experienced professional investors. Exposure to investment professionals during that time resulted in feedback as to what works best, resulting in continuous improvements in the curriculum. Getting students to progress from the definition level of instruction to application of theory has proven to be the greatest educational challenge during that time.

Hank discovered that the same approaches cannot be applied at both beginning and advanced levels. Over the years Hank has taken his own academic theories and secondary research to develop the innovative, workable model, the ACTION SEQUENCE METHOD for building the skills and knowledge of intermediate learners of technical analysis. (The ACTION SEQUENCE is fully explained in the Journal of Technical Analysis article, “System States of Pedagogy and the Action Sequence Model” (Issue 58, Summer-Autumn 2002). While the Action Sequence Model may be very roughly thought of as paper trading, the model includes extensive feedback and replays the original sequence incorporating lessons learned from the previous experience. Hank emphasizes that the replay portion of the model is critical. In this way, the student is being trained to react appropriately to future market circumstances. As a consequence of the efforts of Hank and his colleague’s in the San Francisco financial community, Golden Gate University has the only academically accredited graduate certificate program in technical market analysis in the world.