Laszlo Birinyi, Leading Stock Picker and Market Forecaster, Dies at 79

Laszlo Birinyi, an investor who declared that he took little curiosity in company news, monetary algorithms and even the economic system itself, and who as an alternative “listened” to the market, as he put it, growing a idea in regards to the movement of cash that made him one of many nation’s foremost inventory pickers within the Nineteen Nineties, died on Aug. 21 at his dwelling in Southport, Conn. He was 79.

His spouse, Jill Costelloe Birinyi, mentioned the trigger was continual coronary heart failure.

Mr. Birinyi (pronounced BUH-ree-nee), a former equities analyst at Salomon Brothers who based his personal cash administration agency in Westport, Conn., argued that the market had not solely a historical past but in addition a “psychology,” and he used this perception as the premise for his market predictions.

The public started to sense that Mr. Birinyi was onto one thing within the Nineteen Nineties. As a frequent visitor of “Wall Street Week,” a well-liked present on PBS (and, briefly, CNBC) hosted by Louis Rukeyser, Mr. Birinyi repeatedly gained an annual stock-picking competitors amongst panelists.

From 1993 to 1998, his common annual return was 44 p.c, in opposition to a 19.8 p.c common annual rise by the Dow Jones industrials. His acquire in 1997 was a whopping 74 p.c.

“Born in Hungary, raised in Pennsylvania, he regularly makes a goulash of most other market analysts,” Mr. Rukeyser mentioned whereas inducting Mr. Birinyi into the present’s Hall of Fame in 1999. “He has become Wall Street’s No. 1 number cruncher and, quite simply, the single best securities analyst operating in the 1990s.”

On the present, Mr. Birinyi had the nasal, high-pitched voice, spherical wire spectacles and confident tone of an archetypal monetary whiz. He didn’t at all times ship his predictions in layman’s English, however the genial Mr. Rukeyser was there for attentive follow-up questions and on-the-spot jargon translation.

After “Wall Street Week” went off the air in 2003, news retailers, together with The New York Times, continued to seek the advice of Mr. Birinyi as a monetary skilled. He foresaw the bull market that started in 2009 through the monetary disaster and presciently suggested traders to stay with the market through the extreme downtown of August 2015.

Yet some view the very thought of market prognostication with skepticism. In 2011, after Mr. Birinyi predicted that the S&P 500 would improve to 2,854 factors by late summer season 2013, Larry Swedroe, a wealth supervisor and monetary author, used him as a case research of why to be cautious of monetary forecasting.

Mr. Birinyi had been wildly off about how the identical market index would carry out from the top of 2000 to the top of 2001, Mr. Swedroe wrote in a column for the web site CBS Moneywatch. And, in reality, Mr. Birinyi’s prediction about summer season 2013 turned out to be off the mark by greater than 1,000 factors.

Mr. Birinyi based his agency, Birinyi Associates, when he left Salomon Brothers in 1989. Today, the agency manages about $340 million, primarily from rich people, in line with Jeffrey Yale Rubin, who turned the agency’s president following Mr. Birinyi’s loss of life.

In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered that the agency unfairly advantaged a small group of purchasers centered on day buying and selling in opposition to these pursuing longer-term funding methods. Without admitting or denying the costs, Birinyi Associates agreed to pay a civil penalty of $100,000 and to retain an impartial compliance advisor.

Mr. Birinyi usually distilled his philosophy of the market within the phrase “follow the money.” He developed a system for figuring out whether or not a inventory commerce was initiated by patrons or sellers. That enabled him to transcend the inventory worth, pinpointing investor curiosity and seeing whether or not cash was prone to movement into or out of a inventory.

“I try and see where savvy investors are putting their money,” he advised The Times in 1998.

His research of market historical past taught him, he mentioned, that lengthy bull markets have 4 levels: reluctance, consolidation, grudging acceptance and enthusiasm. This final interval is marked by fearless habits, the entry into the market of unskilled day merchants and, ominously, the chance of a coming crash.

This led Mr. Birinyi to the paradoxical conclusion that gloomy commentary by market watchers was really encouraging — earlier than the exuberance stage had taken maintain — whereas sunny market studies signified hazard.

“So you won’t think the market is going down till everybody thinks it’s going up,” Mr. Rukeyser remarked to Mr. Birinyi on an episode of “Wall Street Week” in 1996.

“Exactly right,” Mr. Birinyi mentioned.

“Does this contempt for your colleagues ever bother you when you’re going to bed at night?” Mr. Rukeyser requested.

Mr. Birinyi was able to observe his philosophy to any conclusion it led to; and on this case, the reluctance or grudging acceptance of others was a cheerful signal for his bull market.

“Most people,” he replied, “just aren’t accepting the good news.”

Laszlo Birinyi Jr. was born on Sept. 20, 1943, in Karcag, a city in japanese Hungary. His father was a railway station grasp, and his mom, Margit (Kontes) Birinyi, was a homemaker.

She knew sufficient English to write down letters looking for sponsorship for the household to maneuver to the United States after World War II. They had made a house in Lancaster, Pa., the place Mr. Birinyi Sr. labored at an area manufacturing unit.

Laszlo graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1967 with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past. In the early Seventies, he labored at a number of monetary companies as a pc programmer and at evening studied at New York University for a grasp’s diploma in enterprise, which he acquired in 1975.

He started working at Salomon Brothers, then a number one brokerage agency, the subsequent 12 months. Mr. Birinyi rose to guide its fairness market evaluation group, growing detailed analysis on inventory buying and selling patterns and writing a weekly market commentary.

“His analysis of market data was virtually unique on Wall Street,” The Times wrote in 1989, after he resigned from Salomon Brothers.

Mr. Birinyi’s first marriage resulted in divorce. He married Jill Costelloe in 1986. In addition to his spouse, he’s survived by their two daughters, Natalie Birinyi and Anna Danzer; a brother, Frank; and a grandson.

He continued writing market studies and reviewing his funding portfolios till the final week of his life.

In “The Heretics of Finance,” a 2009 ebook of interviews by Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic, Mr. Birinyi described the expertise of visiting certainly one of his daughters at what he referred to as her “posh nursery school in Manhattan” for Father’s Day. He spent 20 minutes on his arms and knees enjoying along with her. Then he stood up and realized that he and the opposite dads all wished to do the identical factor — discuss in regards to the inventory market.

“For the really successful traders,” he mentioned, “not the technicians, but the real traders, the real portfolio pros — the business is what they eat, sleep and breathe.”