Chapter 1. Biography

“I can understand your feelings about New York, but I don’t think I would be content anywhere else. I am single and unconventional and can breathe only in a big city.” —George Lindsay

Family History

George Lindsay appears to be the fourth generation of the Lindsay family born in Virginia. George’s paternal grandfather, Albert Loftus Lindsay, was an officer in the Confederate army during the American Civil War. In April 1862, Albert was made chief of General John Bankhead Magruder’s signal corps. Albert’s interest in codes and “secret messages” would one day manifest itself in George’s passion for technical analysis.

George Lindsay’s mother, Nellie Victoria Meyer Lindsay (b. 1876; d. 1954) was an actress in musical comedies, on and off Broadway, and used the stage name Nellie Victoria. A photo, dated 1903, of Nellie Victoria can be found in the Macauley’s Theatre collection in the University of Louisville archives. Another photo of Nellie Victoria can be found in the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division. Nellie Lindsay passed away on December 8, 1954.

George’s father, George Sr. (b. 1863; d. 1921), studied engineering and graduated in 1882 from Virginia Tech. He was Chief Journal Clerk of the Virginia legislature for several decades. He was appointed Commissioner of Valuations for Norfolk, Virginia, on March 27, 1900, and served as the first head of the IRS in Norfolk, a position he held until his death in 1921.

George Lindsay was born November 11, 1906, in Portsmouth, Virginia, followed by his brother, Frank Loftus Lindsay, in 1910. The family home at 229 Mount Vernon Avenue in Portsmouth remains there today. At age 14, after the passing of his father, George was sent to the Pennington School in New Jersey, a boarding school 60 miles away from his remaining family, who moved to New York to be with Nellie’s sister.

An interest in engineering ran deep in the Lindsay family. His mother’s artistic talents were inherited by George as well. Inheriting these two very different attributes not only made for the perfect background to Lindsay’s later interest in technical analysis but surely contributed to his unique approach.

Artist

By the fall of 1927, at 21 years of age (see Figure 1.1), George was enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. The school boasts an impressive list of alumni including Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Figure 1.1. George at 21 years of age. (Source: Lindsay family)

Lindsay became involved with one of the heavyweights in the advertising business at that time, James Yates. Family members recount that George was involved with a redesign of the Camel cigarette pack in the 1930s. He even had his brother, Frank, draw the parallel lines on the pyramids. It is well-documented that James Yates, while art director at William Esty, handled the Camel Cigarette account, so a connection between the two men is clear. Yates eventually became Art Director for The Saturday Evening Post. By 1933, George was working as a commercial artist for Macy’s Department Stores.

Despite the consensus view of those who knew him later in life that George was a homosexual, it is known that he did propose marriage to a woman in 1931. George never opened up to anyone as to what went wrong in the relationship or why she turned him down. Late in her life, Nellie would tell others that in the 1930s George would stay in his room by himself and play the Victrola, laugh, and “have a grand time all alone.” As others would recount in the future, George was not a talkative man. Yet, despite these “quirks,” George was personable and always available to answer questions about his work.

Chicago

No one knows for certain when Lindsay developed his interest in the markets or his unique ideas and approach. But on June 1, 1939, George paid $1,475 for a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade (see Figure 1.2), so it can be assumed that he had been intently working on some of his ideas by then and was looking for a way to test them. A year later, after Germany invaded Paris on June 14, 1940, trading at the CBOT came to a virtual standstill. As will be shown in Chapter 2, “The Other History,” George had an immense knowledge of history and could probably see that the immediate future at the CBOT was bleak. That would explain why, on June 12, 1940, he had already sold his seat on the exchange. He was paid $1,300 for it.

Figure 1.2. George in front of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1939. (Source: Lindsay family)

Los Angeles

A month earlier, Frank had moved to Los Angeles in search of work. It wouldn’t have taken much to persuade an unemployed George and Nellie to leave the cold New York winters and move to warm and sunny Los Angeles. The 1944 voter rolls show George and Nellie both registered as Republicans and living in an apartment building in Hollywood. George continued to live with Nellie until her death.

George wrote that he studied aircraft engineering at the University of Southern California at the outbreak of WWII and then worked as an engineer for McDonnell Douglas during the period 1942–45. He couldn’t have been at USC for long because he was still in Chicago in mid-1940 and began his employment at Douglas Aircraft in 1942.

George was part of a massive hiring boom at Douglas Aircraft. World War II meant good times for Douglas. But the company suffered at the end of hostilities. The Douglas Aircraft Co. was forced to cut its workforce by 100,000 people at the end of the war. No doubt, an artist with little in the way of an engineering background was among those to be let go. There is no record of George being employed after his time at Douglas Aircraft. It is thought that by this time George couldn’t handle the pressure and frustration involved in working with others.

He wrote his pamphlet “An Aid to Thinking” in 1950 and founded his advisory service in 1951. By the 1950s, George was itching to get back to New York but was needed to stay in California to take care of Nellie, who had developed breast cancer. It is thought that George preferred the cold climate of New York to the balmy breezes of Southern California. It is well-known that in later years in New York, George would keep a window open during the winter. According to family members, the time surrounding Nellie’s death and the role George played as her primary caregiver was George’s “shining hour.” After Nellie’s death, George left Los Angeles to return to New York in 1955.

The Analyst

Quite a legend has grown up around George Lindsay. Yale Hirsch, in the Stock Trader’s Almanac, wrote, “George Lindsay is one of the few people in the world who from memory can reproduce a chart of stock market prices for every one of the last 150 years.” Lindsay (see Figure 1.3) was a “unique” individual. He was often called eccentric, a loner, peculiar, seemingly bizarre, brilliant, and a typical “Greenwich Village Bohemian.” And yet he has been described just as many times as sharing, modest, open, kind and generous, not materialistic, having a desire to help others, a very sharing person, and willing to admit to being incorrect—two sets of personality traits that are difficult to reconcile.

Figure 1.3. George circa 1960s. (Source: Lindsay family)

His last residence, 720 Greenwich Street in Greenwich Village, was a studio apartment that had a separate bathroom (the water continually dripping from the bathroom tap) and a small kitchen with swinging doors, though he rarely cooked for himself. He slept on a convertible sofa in the main room and did most of his work on a card table there. He had one small bookcase. A poster on his wall, of a naked Venus in a clamshell, he had found on the sidewalk in someone’s trash. Lindsay didn’t even own a television. The ceiling in his apartment was very high and there was a big window that he would keep open even in the winter.

Lindsay was nocturnal so he worked nights. He had a strange living pattern which included breakfast at 3:00 a.m. He never got around to buying dress shirts, and his entire supply came from his sister-in-law, Mary, and niece, Vickie, in California. Despite this lack of interest in clothing and his immediate surroundings, Lindsay was known to be a very vain individual. He had at least two face-lifts during his life. Unfortunately, the last face-lift left him a bit strange in appearance as it pushed up his eyebrows so he looked perpetually surprised or as if his eyebrows might have been burned off. He also wore a toupee. At one time he owned three: one to look as though he had just had a haircut, one to look as though he needed a haircut, and one to appear as a “normal” length.

Political Views

In February of 1970, Ralph Nader announced the formation of Campaign GM. The campaign’s goals included convincing GM’s large institutional shareholders to force GM to “make a larger commitment to solving such problems as air pollution, highway safety, and job opportunities for minorities.”¹

Four days after the defeat of Campaign GM’s proposal at the 1971 shareholders’ meeting, Lindsay felt the need to write the following in his May 28th newsletter:

“The central idea of Ralph Nader’s organization is that various groups should be represented in management—for example, consumers, ethnic minorities, dealers, workers, etc. This goes under the general heading of ‘consumerism’ today, but it is straight out of fascism. Not the fascism that we remember from Hitler, but the original doctrine as introduced by Mussolini in 1922. And General Motors continues under assault on the grounds that it is too big. This, of course, is an essentially socialistic idea.”²

From this small insight into Lindsay’s thinking, and his California voter registration as a Republican, it can be inferred that his politics were decidedly right-wing, conservative. The modern reader will find Lindsay’s politics to be yet another incongruous personality trait of his as the consensus opinion of Lindsay during his New York years was that he was a homosexual. Lindsay is described by his fellow analysts at that time as flamboyant, flaming, a nonstop talker, delightful, and exhilarating. Lindsay must have cut quite a figure with his bright red wig, black patent leather boots, blue double-breasted blazer, and a striped shirt sent by California relatives. In a letter to fellow technician James Alphier (October 18, 1971), Lindsay wrote, “I am single and unconventional and can breathe only in a big city.”³

Advisory Service

Lindsay founded his advisory service while still in California in 1951, and it lasted until 1975. He wrote a weekly investment letter he called George Lindsay’s Opinion. In February 1972, at 65 years of age, Lindsay went to a monthly format. Lindsay maintained his advisory service until 1975 and after that wrote four letters a year as part of John Brown’s The Advisor, which was published in Houston, Texas. In 1979, he became a consultant with Ernst & Company, which took over the production of the newsletter, still based on Lindsay’s analyses. He stopped publishing the newsletter in 1984. Lindsay did not trade for his own account. His love was the research he was doing, and by 1969 his primary research did not concern the markets. Rather, he had discovered “intervals” in history and was certain he had discovered a way to predict historical events. In 1971, he presented his ideas at the first international conference of the World Future Society in Washington, D.C. He also made several presentations on his discovery to a New York organization he belonged to called S.I.R.E., the Society for Investigation of Recurring Events. His ideas are presented in detail in the next chapter.

Stuart Teisch

Stuart Teisch is a name that appeared on the byline of Lindsay’s newsletter next to Lindsay’s own name. Teisch was the other half of the Lindsay organization and had a 17-year association with Lindsay. Stuart Teisch was born April 29, 1929. A native New Yorker, he studied podiatry at Long Island University and was a practicing podiatrist by the time he discovered technical analysis. Technical analysis soon became Teisch’s passion, and he gave up his medical practice to fully immerse himself in the markets. Teisch’s family were even part of the organization: His mother acted as the company’s bookkeeper, and his father and Teisch’s wife, Janice, both helped with the day-to-day operations of the business.

When Lindsay retired in the 1970s, Stuart and Janice moved to Arizona, where he started a phone advisory service and newsletter. In his later years, Teisch worked for Charles Schwab. Stuart Teisch passed away on March 30, 1998, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Track Record

By 1980, Lindsay’s admirers were legion and his detractors were few. The race for first among equals, in the eyes of the public, however, allows for only one champion. At that time, the cup went to Joe Granville, the Kansas City technician famous for his On Balance Volume indicator. Granville was known as a great showman who would emerge from a coffin at an investment conference, or appear to walk across water (at a swimming pool) when meeting clients.

While a comparison to Granville was hardly the kind of thing Lindsay would have appreciated, he must have known he had reached a rarified level in the eyes of the public when the analyst James Alphier published a report in 1981 titled “Granville in Perspective.” In it he summarized Granville’s record. He then compared it to the records of the few market analysts who were true market gurus because of their long records of successful predictions. Listed among those gurus was Lindsay.

Alphier wasn’t the only one to take note of Lindsay. Yale Hirsch, publisher of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, had taken an interest in Lindsay, as well. In 1968, the Almanac began publishing Lindsay’s annual forecast and continued doing so for over a decade. In the 1968 Stock Trader’s Almanac, Yale Hirsch wrote: “Many annual forecasts are published each January by leading Wall Street analysts. One unusual forecaster who has attempted the impossible during the past ten years is George Lindsay, editor of George Lindsay’s Opinion. Each year he predicts the course of the stock market for a whole year, on a month-to-month basis, pinpointing rallies and declines and estimating the price range of the Dow Jones industrial average.” The Stock Trader’s Almanac called Lindsay’s 1969 forecast “the finest long-term forecast we have ever seen.”

In 1987, John Brown, who had merged the Lindsay letter into his own, published a letter from Lindsay dated July 1, 1987. Lindsay died shortly thereafter but not before communicating his feelings to Brown that “it now seems likely that the last high will come some time in August 1987.” On August 25th, the Dow started what appeared to be a normal correction but one that morphed into one of the biggest Wall Street crashes in history as it fell over 40% during the next 39 trading days to an intraday low on October 20, 1987.

Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser

Lindsay appeared twice on Louis Rukeyser’s television program Wall Street Week—once on October 11, 1981, and again on May 8, 1983. Wall Street Week was produced by Maryland Public Television and was the first nationally syndicated television show to focus on Wall Street. The show ran for 32 years before Rukeyser left in 2002.

An inside joke among family members was that because George didn’t like coats and ties, the only dress shirt he had available to wear on the program by that time had a hole in the left shoulder.

During his last appearance on the program, onlookers commented that Lindsay struggled to get to the stage and had to be helped.

Years later, during an episode featuring snippets of past guests and highlighting each guest’s forecasting ability, Rukeyser said, “In October 1981, eight months before history’s greatest bull market began, I interviewed a seemingly bizarre guest, who turned out to be an uncannily accurate forecaster.” During his first appearance on the program in October of 1981, Rukeyser had asked Lindsay, “When do we get out of this bear market and into that bull market?” Lindsay replied, “The end of the bear market—the earliest I can count it is about August 26, 1982. I think 750 to 770 is more like the range of the final low.”

The intraday low of the bear market occurred on August 9, 1982, and the closing low, three days later, was at 776.92.

Death

Lindsay’s obituary in the New York Times states that he died of a heart attack on August 6, 1987. George’s marker is at Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, California, where his ashes are interred.

Conclusion

No one’s life can be summed up in just a few words. The objective of this chapter is not only to document Lindsay’s unusual ability to time the market but also to provide some understanding of the personal history that produced that ability. When drawing a picture, one difference between the artist and nonartist is the way in which they look at the blank page before them. The nonartist often begins by drawing an object, in detail, in one area of the page and then moving on to another detailed object in a different area. An artist, on the other hand, will think in terms of the entire page and use broad, sweeping motions unafraid, almost uninterested, in the details of the figures until the broad sketch is completed. This approach is vividly clear in Lindsay’s approach to the markets and is very different from most approaches to technical analysis today.

Endnotes

¹ Science, May 29, 1970, Vol. 168 no. 3935, pp. 1077–1078.

² Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in this chapter are taken from George Lindsay’s self-published newsletter, George Lindsay’s Opinion, during the years 1959–72.

³ George Lindsay, letter to James Alphier, October 18, 1971.