Louis Richard "Lou" Rukeyser (January 30, 1933 – May 2, 2006) was an American financial journalist, columnist, and commentator, through print, radio, and television.
He was best known for his role as host of two television series, Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, and Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street.He also published two financial newsletters, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street and Louis Rukeyser's Mutual Funds.
Named by People as the only sex symbol of the dismal science of economics, Rukeyser won numerous awards and honors over his lifetime.
Rukeyser was famous for his pun-filled humor, and for trying to get investors to ignore the short term gyrations and think long term. In answering a letter on investing in a hairpiece manufacturer, he quipped that "if your money seems to be hair today and gone tomorrow, we'll try to make it grow back by giving the bald facts on how to get your investments toupee."
Rukeyser was born in New York City, the second of four sons of financial journalist Merryle Stanley and Berenice Helene (née Simon) Rukeyser. He was the younger brother of Merryle S. "Bud", Jr. and older brother of William S. and Robert J.. His ancestors came from England, Germany and Latvia, with his paternal great-grandfather arriving in the United States about 1840. He graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1950, and then attended Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in New Jersey, graduating in 1954.
Career
He spent the next eleven years as a political and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun newspapers. He then moved to ABC television as economics correspondent and commentator. He left ABC in 1973. Even after he moved to television he continued to write for newspapers as a syndicated columnist.
In 1970 he started the popular Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, produced by Maryland Public Television (MPT), a PBS member station, out of their facilities in Owings Mills, Maryland.
Rukeyser took pride in effectively creating the first television show that focused on Wall Street. With a combination of erudition, plainspokenness, and panache, he made the often arcane workings of the stock market and the economy better known to the mass public for 32 years via Wall Street Week.
The show ran for 32 years, before Rukeyser left in 2002 in a dispute with Maryland Public Television executives over their plans to demote him and use younger hosts. MPT executives offered him a five minute segment on the new, retooled show; Rukeyser declined. In his final episode, which was broadcast live, he deplored the decision of Maryland Public Television's management and urged viewers to write their PBS stations and clamor for the new financial program he would soon create. Maryland Public Television fired him immediately after the broadcast and erased the master tape; the only existing copies of the broadcast possibly exist at other PBS stations or in home copies.
After Rukeyser's departure, the series was renamed Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE and co-hosted by the editorial director of Fortune magazine, Geoffrey Colvin, along with Karen Gibbs, a former senior business correspondent on the Fox News Channel. Afterwords, viewership struggled along with a sixth of the audience it had at its peak and never fully recovered. Maryland Public Television finally pulled the plug in June 2005.
Shortly after leaving Wall $treet Week, Rukeyser began a new program, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street (named after one of his newsletters) on the cable channel CNBC. Highly unusual for a cable network, advertising on the show was limited to before-and-after "underwriting" announcements similar to those on non-commercial broadcast stations. This was done at Rukeyser's insistence, so that Garden City, New York, public television stations could offer the program to its viewers on the weekend.
Rukeyser started missing appearances from the show because of his health, and Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street ended its run on December 31, 2004, at Rukeyser's request, after the health problems kept him off the show for more than a year.
Newsletters
The monthly Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street newsletter was first published in 1992; two years later, Louis Rukeyser's Mutual Funds was started.
Rukeyser's monthly newsletters continue to be published by KCI Communications under the editorship of Benjamin Shepherd.
Controversy - The Rukeyser Effect
Over the years, stock traders and analysts noted that a company touted on W$W on Friday would experience a spike (rapid short term advance) in its stock price the following Monday. This phenomenon, dubbed "The Rukeyser Effect," was described as a further demonstration of the program's influence. However, in 1987, Professor Robert Pari of Bentley College published an academic article in the Journal of Portfolio Management detailing the results of a study that found that stocks recommended by Rukeyser's guests on Wall $treet Week not only tended to rise in price and trading volume in the days preceding the Friday evening broadcast, peaking on the Monday afterward, but also tended to under perform the market for up to a year following the recommendation. Rukeyser strongly disputed this claim, but ten years later Professors Jess Beltz and Robert Jennings published another academic article in the Review of Financial Economics reporting results consistent with Pari's original findings, and that there was "little correlation between the 6-month performance of a recommendation and the abnormal volume at the date the recommendation is made." They observed that there were differences in return performance between the recommendations of different individuals, but the market could not discern the more insightful recommendations from the less insightful. Another commentator noted "It is mathematically impossible for the thirty million viewers of this show to beat the market, since they are the market."
Awards and achievements
He received the George Washington Honor Medal of the Freedoms Foundation (presented to his popular radio commentary program, Rukeyser's World, which he ended when he left ABC in 1973) for "an outstanding accomplishment in helping to achieve a better understanding of America and Americans."
Mr. Rukeyser won a second Freedoms Foundation award in 1978 for his newspaper column, begun just two years earlier.
He was granted the first ever GW Loeb award for financial journalism given to a broadcaster.
In 1990 he became the first man to receive the Women's Economic Round Table award "for outstanding service in educating the public about business, financial and economic policy."
In 2000 he received the Financial Planning Association of New York's Malcolm S. Forbes Award for Excellence in Advancing Financial Understanding.
He received nine honorary doctorates for his work as the nation's No. 1 economic educator: from Johns Hopkins University, American University, Loyola College, Western Maryland College, Mercy College, Moravian College, Southeastern Massachusetts University, New Hampshire College and Roger Williams University.
The Fashion Foundation of America named him both the best-dressed man in finance and the most sartorially elegant host in America.
Playboy, acclaiming him in its own best-dressed list, said he was a "rakish raconteur" and a "personal-style knockout."
Family
Rukeyser and his wife, former British journalist Alexandra Gill, had three daughters, Beverley, Susan, and Stacy.
Death
Rukeyser died of multiple myeloma at his Greenwich, Connecticut, home on May 2, 2006, and his body was cremated.
