After nearly five decades of wrangling numbers that would make most mortals weep, Howard Silverblatt, the Wall Street sage who watched the S&P 500 balloon from under 100 to over 7,000, finally traded his desk for a Florida porch swing in late January 2026.
The man who started at S&P on May 17, 1977—back when bell-bottoms were still a wardrobe risk and the Dow lounged around 900—retired just as the blue-chip index punched through 50,000 points for the first time, a milestone that arrived one week after he clocked out. Talk about impeccable timing: the market celebrated his exit by throwing the biggest confetti cannon since the invention of compound interest.
Silverblatt’s career spanned everything from the 1987 Black Monday plunge (where the S&P shed over 20% in a single day) to the 2008 financial crisis meltdowns, and onward to an era where eight of the world’s ten trillion-dollar companies are tech outfits that probably started in someone’s garage.
He leaves behind a legacy as the go-to data wizard for journalists, the guy who could explain dividend payouts while the rest of us were still figuring out how to spell “derivatives.”
Investors, take note: Silverblatt’s parting wisdom boils down to knowing your risk tolerance before the market decides to test it for you. With fewer public companies than in the ’70s but endless ETFs and fancy securities zipping around like caffeinated squirrels, he urged vigilance. Record highs? Perfect time to peek at your portfolio and ask if it’s still behaving or if the bull run has turned it into a lopsided hot mess.
He also reminded everyone that a 1,000-point Dow jump from 49,000 to 50,000 is just a 2% move—cute, but nowhere near the fireworks of doubling from 1,000 to 2,000 back in the day. Percentages don’t lie; round numbers just look good in headlines.
The shift to 401(k)s and individual accounts means retirement now rides shotgun with market whims, for better or worse. Households’ stock holdings hit an all-time high of 45% of financial assets last year, so Silverblatt’s advice rings louder: it’s easy to ride the ups, but the real test is not panic-selling during the downs. “It’s not so much about making money in the good times,” he quipped. “It’s holding on to it in the bad times.”
As for the man himself, the self-described “double geek” (chess team captain and math whiz) plans to dive into Shakespeare, sharpen his chess game, maybe dust off a golf club, and—mercifully—skip those 60-hour weeks. Wall Street may miss its human spreadsheet, but at least the indices won’t have to worry about him fact-checking their exuberance anymore.
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