V.15:9 (407-414): Steve Shellans of MoniResearch Newsletter by Thom Hartle

Computers have managed to insinuate themselves into our lives these days, but not many of us remember the early days. MoniResearch Newsletter publisher Steve Shellans was a pioneer of sorts in the industry; he started to work with computers in earnest 40 years ago, before manned space flight had even been achieved. By the early 1970s, he was a pioneer of another sort when he moved out of New York City, the financial center of the nation, across the country, and there eventually building the beginnings of the market timer database that would be the underpinning of The MoniResearch Newsletter. Shellans came into the public eye in the mid-1980s when Money magazine and USA Today took note of his monitoring of the market timing industry. STOCKS & COMMODITIES Editor Thom Hartle spoke to Steve Shellans via telephone interview on June 19, 1997, asking him about the differences between classic market timers and dynamic asset allocators, why some timing models work better than others, and why hiring a professional money manager is, in the long run, much easier on a fragile ego.

Let’s start with your background. Sure. My undergraduate work was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and after I received my bachelor of science in engineering, I went to work for Exxon Math and Systems. That was in 1957. I interviewed with Exxon, thinking that there had to be a job there for somebody in chemical engineering. As it turned out, they said that they were just forming a computer department, and would I like to join them? I was candid and told them that I had never even seen a computer before, much less worked with one. Computers weren’t exactly sitting on everyone’s desks back in 1957. It was definitely a very different world than it is today. But that offer sounded like a great opportunity, and I spent a year or so learning on the job and finding out how computers worked. I saw all these bright young kids coming out of college with degrees in computer science, even back then, and so I decided that I had better go back to school and get a degree in com-puter science. That led to my master’s degree. One of my specialties was computer graphics, which in turn led to a new career path.