V.15:11 (510-515) Interview Bernie Schaeffer by Thom Hartle

Bernie Schaeffer, president of the Investment Research Institute, is best known as the senior editor of The Option Advisor, the largest-circulation options newsletter in the US. He is also senior editor of Fund Profit Alert and Schaeffer's Research Review newsletters. Schaeffer made the Dick Davis Hall of Fame for being bearish ahead of the stock market correction in 1987, and since then, he has been steadfastly and correctly bullish, in large part to his use of sentiment-based indicators that helped him recently to garner the Market Technicians Association's Best of the Best award in sentiment and psychological analysis; in addition, he has a book due out even as you read this from John Wiley & Sons entitled The Option Advisor: Wealth-Building Techniques Using Equity and Index Options. So how's he view the market these days? To find out, Stocks & Commodities Editor Thom Hartle interviewed Schaeffer via telephone on August 19, 1997.

How did you start out in the business? I had always been fascinated with the stock market, dating back to my years growing up in New York City. I remember my dad taking me to the visitors’ gallery at the New York Stock Exchange and watching the ticker tape go by. Those were the days when you could actually look at a ticker tape and run the paper through your fingers. I remember one particular scene on the floor of the NYSE. There was a problem in Central America that affected United Fruit Co. It was pandemonium at the trading post for United Fruit, and that scene always stuck with me because it was exciting seeing the kind of feverish pitch of activity that can occur in the stock market.