Parquet, Wall Street’s Data Guru, Dies | Legacy & Impact

Howard Silverblatt joined Wall Street at a time when the S&P 500 index was hovering just below the 100-point mark. It was May 1977, and American stocks seemed almost modest from today’s perspective. The total market value of companies in the S&P 500 index hovered around $60 billion.

When he said goodbye and retired in January this year after almost half a century, the same index hovered around the 7,000 mark and the combined market value of the companies in it reached about $60 trillion.

Howard Silverblatt spent his entire career at Standard & Poor’s, now S&P Dow Jones Indices, which manages and calculates key stock indexes including the S&P 500 and Dow Jones. These indices serve investors around the world as important measures of market development.

Over several decades, Silverblatt has become one of America’s most respected market analysts and an extremely reliable guide to the world of stock data. Journalists and investors alike turned to him in moments of euphoria and panic, knowing that instead of big statements, he would offer something more valuable: context and numbers that made sense. His authority rested on working with data and the ability not to be swayed by the crowd.

At the same time, Silverblatt did not only become famous as a “man of index numbers”. On Wall Street, he was one of the best-known and oft-quoted analysts who systematically tracked share buybacks. In them, the company buys its own shares from the market, so fewer of them remain in circulation.

That’s why investors watch them as an important way to return capital in addition to dividends, and also because a smaller number of shares can increase earnings per share for the same profit. His stock market statistics and reports helped investors and the media better monitor how much of the value companies return to shareholders in this way.

That’s why it’s interesting what he says when he says goodbye to Wall Street. It doesn’t sound like a big investment “secret,” more like a set of rules that are perhaps uncomfortably sober. But they make more sense.

Above all, Silverblatt reminds that the investor must know what he is buying and, above all, what risk he carries with it. According to him, the market today is more accessible than ever before, but at the same time it is much more complex. There are fewer publicly traded companies than when he started. Investors, on the other hand, have at their disposal an abundance of ETF funds, derivatives and other instruments that can be bought or sold in seconds.

And in such an environment, he says, it is easy to lose track of what one actually holds. While markets are rising and indexes are breaking records, it’s nice, but it’s also a good time to stop and review your portfolio, as Silverblatt himself recommends.

“It’s a good idea to constantly ask: Am I still where I wanted to be, or has the market changed the distribution of my portfolio in the meantime? And if so, do I want to adjust it back? Above all, every investor should know well what risk they are willing to bear and how quickly they can get to their money,” he is quoted as saying by CNN.

Silverblatt has experienced periods of euphoria and panic, and he knows well that the most damaging to investors are often the moments when they feel that “this time is different” and the market can only go up.

When he talks about records on the American stock exchanges, he also draws attention to something that is usually forgotten. People tend to look at point changes in indexes, but those in themselves can be deceiving. The Dow Jones at 50,000 points looks impressive and a 1,000 point move sounds dramatic.

But Silverblatt points to simple math. The move from 49,000 to 50,000 points represents roughly a two percent change. This is completely different from the situation when the index rose from 1000 to 2000 points in the past, which meant a 100% increase. In other words, the real telling value is not the number of points, but the percentage change.

Silverblatt was not just an observer of the long bull market. He also saw moments when investors’ “certainties” disappeared within a few hours. He considers Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when the S&P 500 index fell by a fifth in a single day, to be one of the strongest moments of his career. To this day, it is the biggest one-day drop in history.

Silverblatt reiterates that investing is not just about making money in good times. “It’s about keeping them in the bad ones,” he says. And he feels that people sometimes underestimate that. “I think risk is one of the main things that people sometimes ignore. We all want to grow, but how do we do when it goes down?” he asks.

According to Jan Tománek, an analyst at the Prague Stock Exchange, Silverblatt’s statistics helped shape the way investors and the media think about the stock market. At the same time, he points out that Silverblatt’s career took place at a time of extraordinary transformation in the financial markets. When he joined Standard & Poor’s in the 1970s, the S&P 500 had only been around for two decades and passive investing was in its infancy.

“Today we perceive the market as something electronic, efficient, and the S&P 500 index as an indisputable building block of the financial system. Howard Silverblatt’s retirement, however, reminds us that there are people behind all the numbers,” says Tománek for SZ Byznys.

According to him, Silverblatt belonged to personalities whose importance went beyond ordinary analytical work. “Over Howard Silverblatt’s 50-year career, the financial world has evolved incredibly. Just as there won’t be another Warren Buffett, because the world is different today, there won’t be another Howard Silverblatt either,” he adds.

At the same time, his own story has an inconspicuous beginning. The Brooklyn native has had an affinity for numbers since childhood, thanks in part to his father, who worked as a tax accountant. He recalls that his first “job” was comparing paper checks at home when he was seven or eight years old.

After studying at Syracuse University, he joined Standard & Poor’s graduate program in lower Manhattan in the late 1970s and remained with the firm throughout his career. After decades of watching the markets through days of euphoria and collapse, he now faces a very different regime.

He is looking forward to reading more, playing chess, going to lectures and maybe even try golf. “I don’t play golf, but I might start,” he says. “I’m definitely going to play more chess. I have a few projects to help friends around the market with, and then I’ll have to figure out what I’m actually going to do. But it’s definitely not going to be sixty-hour work weeks anymore,” he concludes to CNN.

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