Martin Zweig, 1942–2013

On the television show Wall Street Week on Friday, Oct. 16, 1987, investment adviser Martin Zweig was asked if he thought the bull market was ending. “I’ve been really, in my own mind, looking for a crash,” he said. It came on the following Monday—now known as Black Monday—when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged a record 23 percent. Those who had taken the advice Zweig laid out in his newsletter came out 8.7 percent ahead that month, and he became famous.

Born in Cleveland, Zweig became interested in the stock market at 13, “when he received a gift of six shares of General Motors Co. from an uncle,” said Bloomberg.com. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then earned an MBA from the University of Miami and a Ph.D. in finance from Michigan State.

In those years, most finance experts considered it impossible to outearn the market, said MarketWatch.com. “Zweig somehow escaped this academic orthodoxy.” In his newsletter, The Zweig Forecast, and his later career as a hedge-fund manager, “Zweig brought a rigorously empirical and scientific approach to beating the market.”

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His success allowed him to pursue “a singular real estate transaction,” said The New York Times. Zweig spent a record $21.5 million in 1999 to buy the Pierre Penthouse atop the Pierre Hotel overlooking Central Park. He decorated it with his collection of cultural memorabilia, including the dress Marilyn Monroe wore while singing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.