2006 Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards

Communication: Gene Marcial
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?If a column’s worth is measured by the number of arrests it has triggered, then Gene Marcial’s 25-year old weekly “Inside Wall Street” in BusinessWeek is right up there with the best of them.

Marcial’s column is the only one of its kind in the U.S. national media. As the veteran newsman himself describes it, “[Inside Wall Street] provides information on why big investors are buying into or bailing out of certain companies; it may be because of a new product or technology, or some event that would change the company, such as a takeover by another company, or simply that the stock is undervalued based on fundamental reasons. Or they may be selling the stock because of some worry about problems that they see coming to a head.”

Put simply, Marcial offers stock market players the one thing that they covet the most: timely, reliable information in an industry where information is gold. How has Marcial fared as Wall Street sage? In 2003, BusinessWeek reported: “The 157 stock picks featured in the weekly [Inside Wall Street] column last year rose by an average of 26.4% in the six months after the column was published—more than double the average rise in the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index during the same period, and several points better than the NASDAQ Composite, Russell 2000, and Wilshire 5000 stock indexes.”

No wonder there have been numerous attempts by various parties to use illegal means to get hold of each new BusinessWeek issue so they could trade on the stocks Marcial writes about ahead of everyone else. The first and most celebrated case happened in 1988 when two stockbrokers were arrested for insider trading after they allegedly bribed two employees of two printing presses the magazine used, so they could get an early copy. Marcial’s stock picks were reflected in the buying patterns of the two stockbrokers.

Since then, Marcial says, cases of insider trading that can be traced to his columns would surface about every two years. The latest attempt was in April this year when a group of brokers and investment bankers paid off an employee of BusinessWeek’s Wisconsin printer for advanced copies of Marcial’s columns. All are now facing criminal charges.

Marcial, a graduate of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and New York University, and who worked with the Manila Chronicle and Graphic magazine in Manila before joining AP-Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal in New York, as reporter and columnist, reveals that it took him years of very hard work in Wall Street before he could cultivate his credible, trustworthy and well-connected sources. It has paid off. Aside from his consistently popular and respected column (which he calls “an equal-opportunity column where everybody can get information previously available only to big investors”), Marcial has written a book, Secrets of the Street: the Dark Side of Making Money, to significant acclaim.—Gemma Nemenzo