Bernadette Bartels Murphy, a rare woman on Wall Street in the 1950s, whose work as a trader helped legitimize a once mocked approach to anticipating market trends, making her a respected voice in the financial world, and giving her a platform on television To give, died on March 3 in Nyack, NY She was 86 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her niece, Mary Ann Bartels. Mrs. Murphy died in her niece’s house.
Ms. Murphy began her career at the investment bank Ladenburg Thalmann & Company as a secretary – one of the few roles available to women in the financial industry at the time. But over time she became a trader and analyst, and found a national audience as a regular panelist at Louis Rukeyser’s long-running Wall Street Week, a public television appearance of her for 25 years.
Ms. Murphy worked as a secretary and found it was the work of the traders on her desk that interested her more. She began studying the movements of stocks and the overall market to anticipate future trends, an approach known as technical analysis.
At the time, this method of anticipating market movements was rejected by traditionalists who favored an approach called fundamental analysis: predicting a shift in stock price by determining the intrinsic value of a company and its stocks. They often mockingly referred to technical analysts as “chartists” for the graphs and data tables they looked through for their forecasts.
“I had to keep my diagrams in the bottom drawer of my desk,” Ms. Murphy recalled in an interview with an industry magazine in 1992. “In those days, technical analysis was not considered an acceptable discipline, not in a conservative company.”
To learn more about the business, she took courses at the New York Institute of Finance and began making her own charts. Using the trading floor around her as a training ground, she gathered information about the interactions between the various markets her company operated in, such as corporate and municipal bonds, stocks, and overseas trade orders. (After leaving Ladenburg, she worked for two other Wall Street firms.)
She also began sharing her ideas with colleagues and industry contacts in a newsletter, This Is What I Think, which became her calling card, prompting her company’s clients to ask their managers for their views on the deals they were considering. In the early 1970s, she was monitoring stock portfolios for clients and sharing her projections with them.
Its outbreak came in 1973 when a market crash and global economic downturn left stocks swooning in a 21 month long swoon.
“My readings were very accurate,” said Ms. Murphy in “Women on the Street: Making It On Wall Street – The Toughest Business In The World” (1998) by Sue Herera. For example, she expected a sharp dip in a popular group of stocks known as the “Nifty 50” which included household names like Coca-Cola and Polaroid.
“My timing was right, my expectation of what would happen to stocks was on the money, so I got calls from institutions and invitations to lunch,” Ms. Murphy said in the book. “And so started my business.”
Ms. Murphy, who encouraged women to pursue careers on Wall Street, appeared on the cover of a women’s business magazine in 1994. Recognition…via Murphy family
In 1979 she appeared on Wall Street Week, which aired on Friday night.
Ms. Murphy was known within the industry for her contributions to trade groups and civic organizations. She has served at various times as President of the Chartered Market Technicians Association, the New York Society of Security Analysts, and the Financial Women’s Association. She was a charter member and governor of the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, trustee of Pace University, and a board member of the American Lung Association of New York City.
“Everyone in an organization was always trying to get Bernadette to join, which she often did because she was a social bee,” said Sheila Baird, founding partner of investment firm Kimelman & Baird, where Ms. Murphy was a primary market analyst for many years.
Bernadette Bartels was born on City Island in the Bronx on April 9, 1934, the son of Joseph Francis Bartels, a stationary engineer (maintenance of industrial machines and systems), and Julia (Flynn) Bartels, a Nurse. She was the youngest of four children. She is survived by her sister Julia Campbell.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Our Lady of Good Counsel (now part of Pace University) in White Plains, NY. She credited her father with using her education to make a career.
“I knew for a fact that I would achieve something before my wedding. That was my driving force, ”she said to Ms. Herera. “I wanted to be a fulfilled person, confident.”
In 1982 she married Eugene Francis Murphy, whom she met on Tiana Beach in Hampton Bays, New York, after saving her from a flood. The orthodontist Dr. Murphy died in 1997.
Ms. Murphy, who retired from Kimelman & Baird in 2015, encouraged women to pursue careers on Wall Street, whether speaking in high schools or colleges, or informally with friends and family members. One of them was Mary Ann Bartels, her niece, who became the executive director of Bank of America.
Mrs. Bartels recalled a story Mrs. Murphy often told. As a child, she said, she stopped at a waterfront arcade on City Island and put a coin in a machine to get her horoscope. “It was said that her element was fire, her color was red and ‘you are an aries, the aries – a trailblazer and a pioneer’,” said Ms. Bartels. “She told us this story so many times, and she really lived after it every day.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed to the research.
