By Krystal Hur | Photography by Josh Aronson for WSJ
The high priest of the S&P 500 index. The dean of data. The earnings pope.
Those are all monikers bestowed upon Howard Silverblatt, longtime senior index analyst at S&P Global. Famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of the benchmark stock index and his fast-paced Brooklyn burr, he has been a markets data maven for everyone from Wall Street analysts to financial journalists.
But after nearly 49 years, Silverblatt has taken on a new title: Florida retiree.
Silverblatt spent his entire career at S&P, a rarity among restless Wall Street hustlers who often flit between companies to climb the corporate ladder. His monthly email blasts, chock-full of data on earnings, stock buybacks and returns tied to the S&P 500, have long been considered essential reading for market watchers. Now many are wondering what they will do without him.
"That 60-hour work week was not as much fun as it used to be," Silverblatt, 71 years old, said in an interview. "We are entering a new stage, and you do need people coming up to fill that."
Today's financial markets are a far cry from what they were decades ago. The S&P 500 returned around 12% on an annualized basis during Silverblatt's nearly half-century-long run, counting price changes and dividend payments. The adoption of electronic systems has made trading faster and more plentiful than ever before. Individual investors have flooded into markets, while nontraditional assets from cryptocurrencies to prediction markets have exploded in popularity.
In contrast, Silverblatt has remained anchored in the past. He prefers reading newspapers over screens, still creasing the pages into a subway fold like he was taught as a child. He crunched numbers using an old DOS-based database manager, printing out hard copies full of data and checking the figures by pen. He kept a pager clipped to his belt.
"I like the fact that he, in some ways, represents the old Wall Street," said Jason DeSena Trennert, co-founder and chairman of Strategas. "He's kind of a scrappy guy."
Silverblatt grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that he shared with his older sister and parents. His mother worked part time as a bookkeeper while his father was a tax attorney. He studied business management at Syracuse University.
Silverblatt began his career at Standard & Poor's in 1977, poring over corporate filings and reports to create databases and help compile the S&P stock guide, known as the bible of Wall Street before stock information was readily available online. Early in his career, he and his colleagues would sometimes sleep at a bar close to the office instead of at home. He later began paying a nearby coffee cart to have his order ready for him every morning at 6 a.m.
He met his wife, Rebecca, at a wedding in 1992 that he attended as a friend's plus one, irking her by interrupting her conversation with the bride. She was dating another man at the time ("He had a boat," Silverblatt says), but by the following year, she and Silverblatt were married. About a year after that, they welcomed their first child.
"Howard lives and works at warp speed," said CFRA Research's Sam Stovall, who worked with Silverblatt at S&P Global for 28 years. "He basically is in a totally different dimension from the rest of the world, and that's how he gets things done."
He was similarly headstrong in his work. David Blitzer, former chair of the S&P index committee and Silverblatt's old boss, recalls once arguing with a reporter on the phone after refusing to give him data for an article. The next day, he saw those very figures in the paper. The source turned out to be Silverblatt.
"Howard was always sort of his own guy," said Blitzer.
For Silverblatt, it was a no-brainer to give the data to the reporter -- or to anyone who asked. He tried to answer every question that entered his inbox, from individual investors at home, financial journalists on deadline or investing firms. Colleagues at S&P Global would send him their own requests, too.
In a 2001 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Chuck Hill, then-director of research at First Call, accused S&P of acting like a self-appointed "earnings pope," for including expenses in calculating operating earnings that most analysts believed should be excluded. Silverblatt responded through his own Journal interview: "We have no problem with being the pope." He now says that is his favorite of his nicknames.
Things changed when the Covid pandemic hit. He and his wife began spending a couple of days a week in Florida, where he would work remotely. Eventually, they decided to leave New York City.
He still mostly kept up his grueling schedule. He would get up at 5 a.m. to start his day by looking through batches of data. But he also began taking short naps at around 6:30 a.m. and logging into meetings on the beach. If a colleague said something he didn't like, he would wordlessly turn his camera around to the ocean in front of him.
These days, Silverblatt lives in a 55-and-up retirement community near Palm Beach with his wife and is looking to eventually buy a home. He has joined an economic club, and takes notes on earnings reports, stocks and other market minutiae to present at the weekly meetings. He is trying to read "normal" books unrelated to financial markets, such as Shakespeare's plays and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Over time, it became clear just how reliant many people and institutions had become on Silverblatt.
There was "a certain amount of concern by senior management -- what are we going to do if Howard retires? At the time I left, which was 2019, there was no answer," said Blitzer.
Seven years later, there still doesn't appear to be a clear answer. CFRA's Stovall said that a so-called Howard Silverblatt replacement project will struggle because "I don't think anybody has the depth of knowledge that he does," he said.
One person who isn't stressed is Silverblatt. He turns 72 on Thursday. His children are coming to visit next week, and he plans to open a bottle of a 1954 Armagnac (his birth year) with them that he has kept for two decades. Over the next few weeks, he will take a bottle of a 1975 Macallan to New York City to enjoy a glass with old Wall Street pals. Longer term, his plans are more fluid.
"I've got to figure out what I want to do. What do I want to do when I grow up?" said Silverblatt.
Write to Krystal Hur at krystal.hur@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 03, 2026 09:44 ET (14:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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