(Bloomberg) -- Arthur Cashin, a fixture at the New York Stock Exchange for six decades whose daily commentaries in print and on television mixed market analysis with history, trivia and humor, has died. He was 83.
CNBC, his television home for more than a quarter-century, announced his death without providing details.
As director of NYSE floor operations for UBS Financial Services Inc., Cashin, known as Art, appeared regularly on CNBC to provide live observations about markets and trading — plus whatever else was on his mind.
During a 2011 report focusing on the performance of mobile phone makers, he complained about youngsters “my grandchildren’s age, tweeting at the table instead of having conversations.”
As “Wall Street’s version of Walter Cronkite,” Cashin carried “enough gravitas to scold Washington bigwigs without appearing political” and to calm UBS’s wealth investors when markets got rough, Thomas Heath of the Washington Post wrote in a 2019 profile.
Bob Pisani, the CNBC reporter who regularly interviewed Cashin on the floor, credited his unvaryingly unremarkable wardrobe and “slightly rumpled” appearance with boosting his credibility. “People say, ‘This is a guy I can relate to,’” Pisani told Heath.
Cashin’s long institutional service to the NYSE included stints as a governor and a member of its Market Performance Committee.
He estimated that Cashin’s Comments, the morning commentary he wrote for UBS brokers and others, reached more than 100,000 people.
Teasers, Trivia
A typical edition led off with a anecdote about a noteworthy event that happened “on this day” in history, then segued to an insightful explanation of why the markets behaved as they did the previous day and what traders are likely to focus on during the next 24 hours. They usually ended with a brain teaser or trivia question (“Name six state capitals that start with the letter S”) that were answered the following day (Sacramento, Salem, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, Springfield and St. Paul).
After the NYSE closing bell, Cashin could be found just down Broad Street in his corner seat at Bobby Van’s steakhouse, a Financial District gathering place.
“He held court for all those that would give a listen,” Jay Woods, another former NYSE governor, told Bloomberg in 2022, when Bobby Van’s closed after 16 years. “His corner at the bar was legendary, and tourists would come there just to see him and take a photo or two. In fact, they roped off the area just for him and his NYSE friends.”
Arthur Daniel Cashin Jr. was born on March 7, 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Arthur and Gertrude Cashin. His father died a few months before he graduated from Xavier High School, a Jesuit school in New York City. To help support his mother, sister and brother, Cashin looked for work on Wall Street.
In 1959 he got a job as an assistant clerk at Thomson McKinnon Securities Inc., a brokerage firm, earning $39 a week.
NYSE Member
In 1964, at 23, he became a partner at P.R. Herzig & Co. and a member of the NYSE.
At home in Jersey City, Cashin managed the successful 1973 reelection campaign of the mayor, Paul T. Jordan, and then, in 1977, ran for the post himself.
His distinguished his candidacy by handing out flowers instead of leaflets and sharing a ticket with three female candidates for City Council, the New York Times reported, adding that Cashin had sold his NYSE seat to seek office.
Cashin finished third in a field of five candidates.
In 1980, he joined PaineWebber Inc. as head of floor trading and began presenting a verbal market outlook during daily morning meetings of the firm’s institutional brokers. In 1983 he started writing market commentaries for brokers, who often forwarded them to their clients. PaineWebber would be acquired by UBS AG in 2000.
‘Smelling Panic’
In The Way It Was, a 1987 oral-history project by Institutional Investor, Cashin described the job of the NYSE floor trader as “the financial equivalent of being an airplane pilot: an hour of boredom, 10 minutes of sheer terror, then half an hour of boredom again.”
“We talk on the floor about smelling panic in the air,” he added. “And if you smell panic, that’s probably the time, if you can, to suggest to a client that he limit his order, step back a bit.”
Following the Black Monday stock market crash of October 1987, Cashin began delivering market analysis for Financial News Network and later CNBC, appearing several times a week.
Cashin was active in charities at the NYSE. He co-founded the exchange’s Christmas Dinner Fund, providing holiday meals for poor families in New York, running the event from 1982 to 2006. He was chairman of the Fallen Heroes Fund, which assists families of New York City police and fire fighters who are killed on duty.
He also led the group singalong of Wait ‘Til the Sun Shines, Nellie on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, an NYSE floor tradition.
Cashin’s wife, the former Joan Perkowski, died in 1998 after 36 years of marriage. They had two sons and a daughter, Jennifer, who died in 2007.
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