Louis Rukeyser, RIP

The man who brought financial journalism into the television age is dead at 73. I loved his show and watched it for years.

One thing deserves mention about the integrity he brought to his show. For a long time, they used a forward-looking index of technical indicators ("the eleves") as part of the show. Throughout it's run this index was periodically revised. If the current version stopped predicting, they stopped using it and tried to make a better one.

LR also dropped a couple of regular panelists over the years because they 1) had a conflict of interest, or 2) stopped saying useful things. It was not so much a bias for bulls or bears. But if an analyst was bearish for three years while the market kept breaking records, they stopped showing up.

All in all, Rukeyser was the antithesis of most of the cable programming today. That is our loss.