Longtime Wall Street columnist Marcial dies at 89

Gene Marcial, a longtime Wall Street columnist for BusinessWeek magazine, has died at the age of 89.

Marcial wrote the “Inside Wall Street” column at BusinessWeek magazine for 28 years, through Dec. 30, 2009. It was one of the most influential market columns as it moved stocks that he highlighted each week. BusinessWeek established a yearly ScoreCard Report that tracked the performance of the stocks cited in his column, and invariably the results confirmed their positive impact.

“‘The adrenaline flows whenever I sit down to write my column,’ he said in a 2006 interview. ‘This is not bragging or boasting. The pros on Wall Street know the column and they will admit that they follow it.’

Before BusinessWeek, Marcial worked at The Wall Street Journal.

He was also the author of two well received books: “Secrets of the Street: The Dark Side of Money Making” published by McGraw-Hill in 1995, and “Gene Marcial’s Seven Commandments of Stock Investing,” published by FT Press in 2008.

Marcial resumed writing the “Inside Wall Street” column for AOL DailyFinance after Bloomberg acquired Business Week in December 2009. Subsequently, he moved the column to MSN.com after AOL merged with the Huffington Post. For the past 10 years, Marcial, who was 89 years old, was a contributor for Forbes.com, writing a column entitled “Street Beat.”

He came from the Philippines to the United States in the 1950s and continued his studies at New York University where he earned a masters degree in political science.

Marcial is survived by an older brother, four daughters: Brenda Marcial, Carmina Marcial, Joy Marcial and Jaime Cohen; and seven grandchildren: Dean Marical, Molly Marcial, Vaughn Ayroso, Julia Ayroso, Brandon Cohen, Kaila Cohen and Courtney Cohen.