Remembering Anthony Tabell

Remembering Anthony Tabell

August 5, 1931 – April 27, 2020

Anthony (Tony) Tabell, 88, of Exeter, NH and formerly of Princeton, NJ died peacefully on Monday, April 27, 2020.

He was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, NY to Edmund W. and Margaret (Suydam) Tabell. He grew up in Riverside, CT and graduated from St Luke’s School and Colgate University, Class of 1952. After serving in the army, he joined his father at Walston and Company where he consulted with a variety of institutions and pursued technical market research, inspired largely by his father Edmund.

In 1965, he became senior vice-president, a member of the board of directors, and the director of technical research at Walston and Company. Tony was one of the earliest practitioners of technical market analysis, having learned the value of point and figure charts from his father Edmund, and subsequently shifting to computer models as early as the late 50s and early 60s. In an interview with Professor Andrew Lo of MIT, Mr. Tabell commented that “I liked computers. I liked sitting down and writing computer programs in assembly language… it was a natural marriage with what I was doing with technical analysis, because technical analysis is analysis of data… I’m probably one of the first people who tried to evaluate stock price returns on a computer, necessarily a mainframe.” Tony also authored the Tabell Market Letter, a weekly publication he took over from his father, after his death, in 1965. The letter, a Wall Street institution since 1944, boasted a circulation of over 100,000. In addition, he was a founding member of the Market Technicians Association (now the CMT) and served as its president from 1975-76. He was a member of its board of directors until his retirement in 1993.

In 1970, Mr. Tabell left Walston and Company in NYC to form, with Matt Delafield and Ashton Harvey, the Princeton, NJ brokerage firm of Delafield Harvey Tabell which initially operated as a division of Janney Montgomery Scott. The firm’s steady success caught the attention, in 1991, of the US Trust Company, and soon after, DHT merged with USTrust.

Tony was also an enthusiastic traveler and adventurer, a trait he passed down to his children and grandchildren. He and his wife, Ellen (Molwitz) Tabell, visited all seven continents, and especially enjoyed travels to Antarctica and eastern Africa, to which they journeyed three times on different family safaris. An avid skier and mountain climber, he skied throughout Europe and the western states, but was happiest in New England where he spent many hours on the slopes of Killington and Okemo with his daughters and grandchildren.
Tony, who grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was also a long-suffering fan of the New York Mets and counted their 1969 World Series victory as one of the happiest days of his life. In 1985, his tongue-in-cheek theory about the correlation of the team’s success and the stock market’s dips was picked up by the AP and appeared in newspapers across the country.

In addition to Ellen, his high school sweetheart and wife of 66 years, Tony is survived by his three daughters, Meg (John) Kasprak of Brunswick, ME, Roberta (Bob) Jordan of West Bath, ME and Sarah (Steve) Nocka of Wellesley, MA. He will also be missed by his grandchildren Alex Kasprak, Nick Kasprak and his wife Emily, Chris Kasprak and his husband Danny, Molly Jordan and her husband, Andrew, Sarah Jordan, and Andrew, Kristen, and Thomas Nocka.

Brewitt Funeral Service & Crematory

Read about Anthony in The Heretics of Finance: Conversations with Leading Practitioners of Technical Analysis, by Andrew W. Lo, Jasmina Hasanhodzic – John Wiley and Sons, May 21, 2010.