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At the age of 80, Byron Wien compiled “20 Life Lessons” from a long career as a fortune teller on Wall Street. “Never Retire” was No. 20. “If you work forever, you can live forever,” he explained. “I know there is an abundance of biological evidence against this theory, but I still agree with it.”
Mr. Wien (pronounced ween) has not avoided biology. But when he died on October 25 at the age of 90, he was still absorbed daily in reading the economic tea leaves of his most recent employer, the private equity firm Blackstone. He continued to solicit intelligence from politicians, central bankers and financial titans around the world to shape his strategic reports for his company. And when he felt like his own colleagues weren’t watching him enough or putting him in enough meetings, he told them he had enough bandwidth.
“He was thirsty for knowledge and was probably the most curious person I have ever encountered,” said Joan Solotar, the global head of the private wealth division at Blackstone, Mr. Wien’s boss.
“I had the pleasure of giving Byron his annual review,” she added in an interview, “and he sat down and asked the same question every year: ‘Tell me what I can do better.’”
Mr. Wien, a well-known quote provider for the financial news media and a room-filling conference speaker, was for 38 years the author or co-author of a popular annual forecast, “Ten Surprises,” which anticipated trends in the financial world. markets, politics and world economies.
While some predicted economic disaster after the election of Donald J. Trump, Wien’s optimistic call in January 2017 for a 12 percent increase in the S&P 500 was a matter of money.
But not all of his predictions were so. In January 2016, he predicted that Hillary Clinton would defeat Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the presidential race that year. This year he predicts a ceasefire in Ukraine and a drop in oil prices to $50 a barrel. (It was over $80.)
He said his win-loss record didn’t matter; he wanted to “expand people’s minds,” as he put it.
One place that wasn’t popular on the list was his own home. “My wife hopes I’ll give this up as soon as possible,” Mr. Wien told The New York Times in 2001. “While people are enjoying the holidays, between Thanksgiving and Christmas I’m in total panic and working really hard on developing this one.”
Before joining Blackstone, Mr. Wien was Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. strategist for 21 years, where he oversaw a 50-stock model portfolio that was widely followed by investors. First Call, a financial news service, named him the most read analyst of 1988. Smart Money magazine named him Wall Street’s No. 1 strategist in 1990.
For Blackstone, which he joined in 2009, Mr. Wien also published conclusions from debates he hosted during summer lunches with famous investors such as George Soros at his home in Wainscott, N.Y., a hamlet on the East End of Long Island. (He also had a house in Manhattan.) He led those discussions, which he called “Benchmark Lunches,” like a schoolmaster.
“He would ask a question and appeal to people, or they would raise their hands, and there would be a group discussion, rather than someone holding their position,” Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chairman, said in an email -mail. “It was a masterclass for the top people on Wall Street.”
Byron Richard Wien was born on February 14, 1933 in Chicago. His father, Max Wien, was a doctor who died when Byron was 9, and his mother, Anne (Lurie) Wien, died when he was 15. His mother’s sister took him in until he graduated from Senn High School in Chicago.
While in his senior year there, he was summoned by a guidance counselor, who told him that a Harvard admissions officer was coming through Chicago and that the officer had asked to interview a bright student from the school.
“He then said, ‘You are our choice, and if you go there, don’t kid yourself,’” Mr. Wien later wrote. “I went to Harvard and it changed my life.”
He graduated in 1954 and attended Harvard Business School, graduating in 1956.
Mr. Wien began his career on Wall Street in the mid-1960s at a money management firm and eventually joined Morgan Stanley in 1985 as a U.S. markets strategist. The job required writing a weekly essay and traveling around the world. In interviews before he was hired, he was repeatedly told he would be perfect for the job, he wrote in a reminiscence for The Times in 2011.
“I later found out that I was the seventh person they had targeted with that phrase,” he wrote.
To distinguish himself from other strategists, he came up with the idea for an annual list of surprising predictions, but according to him, Morgan Stanley was initially not enthusiastic about the idea.
“They said, ‘Byron, if you get all ten wrong, you will embarrass the company and humiliate yourself.’ Frankly, we don’t care about your humiliation, but we don’t want the company to be embarrassed,” he later recalled.
After more than twenty years at Morgan Stanley, Mr. Wien joined Pequot Capital Management, a hedge fund, where he worked until the firm closed its doors in 2009.
Blackstone hired him when he was 76 and named him vice chairman of Private Wealth Solutions, a group that serves financial advisors and their high-net-worth clients. “He may have been 76, but he was tireless,” Mr. Schwarzman said. “He would go anywhere. When you put him in front of a group he was like magic – so observant and endlessly patient.”
A first marriage for Mr. Wien ended in divorce. In 1978, he married Anita Volz, president of the Observatory Group, an economic consulting firm. She survives him. He died in Southampton, NY
Mr. Wien compiled his list of life lessons learned during his first eight decades in 2012 and published them on Blackstone’s website. He gave advice such as ‘read all the time’, ‘travel a lot’ and ‘network intensely’.
“The hard way is always the right way,” was No. 4. “Never take shortcuts unless you’re driving home from the Hamptons. Shortcuts can be perceived as sloppiness, a career killer.
