Quick Facts
Biography
Elaine M. Garzarelli (born 1950/1951) is an American financial analyst.
Biography
Garzarelli was born in Pennsylvania, United States, North America.
Garzarelli received her undergraduate degree from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1969. She went on to receive her doctorate from the same institution, now known as Drexel University, in 1977.
Black Monday call
While working as a stock analyst at Shearson Lehman, she became known for predicting Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987. As indicated in the Wall Street Journal article on October 28, 1987, “Ms. Garzarelli, a research analyst and money manager for Shearson Lehman Brothers, Inc., turned bearish on Sept. 9. By Oct. 12, when she appeared on Cable News Network’s “Money Line” program, she was fiercely bearish, predicting an imminent collapse in the stock market. She gave USA Today a similarly dire forecast the next day.”
Despite her success, she expressed discomfort with being put on a pedestal as a seer with a crystal ball:
"I felt awkward because I got so much attention. A few weeks after that I made a negative comment, and the market dropped 120 points that day. The Wall Street Journal wrote that I had moved the stock market, and I was very uncomfortable. My career was going very nicely until then, and it was too much attention. It was a lot of pressure."
Her subsequent predictions, however, were much less stellar. To test myth against reality, Mr. Sherden analyzed her published stock-market predictions between 1987 and 1996 and found her to be something less than a seer. He writes, "Garzarelli was right only five out of thirteen times, or 38 percent — a record that is worse than the 50 percent chance of flipping a coin."[7]
Garzarelli Research
Garzarelli was a partner and managing director at several major brokerage firms until 1995 when she founded her own business, Garzarelli Research, Inc.. For eleven years she had been ranked as Wall Street's top Quantitative Analyst in Institutional Investor magazine's poll.
In the spring of 2003, shortly before the inflation adjusted S&P 500 fell, she predicted "a stock market stuck in a holding pattern for years".