[1] The Theorist began as Robert Prechter's vehicle for Elliott wave market opinions when he worked as a technical analyst at Merrill Lynch.

In the early 1980s, the Theorist issued an aggressively bullish stock market forecast; its prominence grew, and the number of subscribers eventually reaching some 20,000.

[2] That number declined in the 1990s (as did subscription levels among financial publishers generally), though the Theorist remains frequently cited on financial websites,[3] in blogs[citation needed], newsgroups, books,[4] scholarly papers,[5][6] and by major media.

"[12] Following Benoit Mandelbrot's 1999 Scientific American article "A Fractal Walk Down Wall Street,"[13] the Theorist ran detailed criticism of that article, saying that Mandelbrot took credit for ideas that "originated with Ralph Nelson Elliott, who put them forth more comprehensively and more accurately with respect to real-world markets in his 1938 book The Wave Principle.

"[14] In recent years the Theorist has been credited with popularizing market indicators such as the “skyscraper indicator,”[15] and been a forum for ideas and research regarding socionomics from Prechter and others, such as the 2006 essay, “Social Mood and Automobile Styling,” which received wide media coverage.