Marc Chaikin is the only newsletter publisher whose name appears at the bottom of every Bloomberg terminal on the planet, and that fact reframes everything else about him. The gurus who sell stock picks on CNBC generally have a marketing team and a story. Chaikin has a mathematical legacy embedded in the infrastructure of institutional trading. The Chaikin Money Flow indicator, the Chaikin Oscillator, and the Accumulation/Distribution Line are built into Bloomberg, Reuters, thinkorswim, MetaStock, TradingView, TC2000, and StockCharts. If you have ever pulled up a stock chart on a major platform and seen “CMF” in a sub-panel, that is his work, and it has been there since the 1980s.
That is the foundation underneath a 50-plus-year career that now includes a MarketWise-acquired analytics firm, a retail newsletter with sustained national TV ad spend, and a March 2026 crash prediction that is already on the books as a near-miss. The full arc runs from a Shearson Hammill broker’s desk in 1966 to a conglomerate-breakup pitch running on CNBC in 2026, and the thread connecting them is the same conviction: the numbers tell the truth before the narrative does.
The Foundation
Chaikin attended Brown University from 1960 to 1964, studying government and politics. He was licensed as a stockbroker on October 7, 1966 — the day the bear market of 1966 ended, a piece of timing he has recalled in multiple interviews with something close to amusement. He started at Shearson Hammill, one of the predecessor firms to what became Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, at a time when fundamental research was the orthodoxy and chart books were kept in desk drawers because the office manager considered technical analysis a distraction from the firm’s recommendations. For the first two and a half years, everything went up, and fundamental analysis worked. Then the bear market of 1969 arrived, and the fundamental analysts kept reiterating buy recommendations as stocks dropped from 100 to 15, throwing in the towel somewhere near the bottom. Chaikin told Stocks & Commodities in 1993 that the experience is what drove him to technical analysis. He realized the fundamental research department’s recommendations were a bull-market tool that failed when conditions changed, and he started the research project that became his career.
He became head of the options department at Tucker Anthony & R.L. Day in the 1970s, bought a seat on the New York Futures Exchange where he traded futures contracts, and in 1980 began developing proprietary stock market indicators. In 1982 he joined Drexel Burnham Lambert, the high-flying firm that financed companies that were not always creditworthy, and that year he began hosting a regular segment on the Financial News Network, the original incarnation of what became CNBC. The TV appearances started 44 years before the 100X Starburst commercials.
Bomar, Instinet, and the Institutional Years
In 1989, Chaikin left Drexel and, with a partner in Philadelphia, founded Bomar Securities LP, an institutional brokerage firm built around a technical-analysis workstation for buy-side portfolio managers and trading desks. The clients were the institutional money managers most retail investors only read about: T. Rowe Price in Baltimore, Delaware Management, hedge funds in New York, growth managers in Boston. Bomar built the first real-time Windows-based market-monitoring system, which allowed portfolio managers and traders to watch the market in real time based on technical patterns and signals. The client list grew to roughly 50 institutions.
In 1992, Bomar sold to Instinet, the electronic-trading arm of Reuters. Chaikin became a senior vice president and director at Instinet, and the business grew to 15,000 institutional clients. He started Instinet Research, a quantitative research department servicing Instinet’s 20,000 institutional clients, and the proprietary analytics he developed became a key part of the Thomson Reuters institutional workstation. Instinet grew from $40 million in revenue to a billion dollars during his tenure, and his institutional clients included hedge funds run by Steve Cohen, Paul Tudor Jones, Michael Steinhardt, and George Soros — the names the Power Gauge marketing materials cite today. Cohen’s firm, SAC Capital, grew from $20 million to $14 billion in part using Chaikin’s research, a fact the marketing materials emphasize. The institutional years are the credential layer underneath everything that followed.
In 1998, Chaikin took a one-year sabbatical at his weekend house in Connecticut to play tennis, and the sabbatical turned into a 10-year retirement. He had retired young from Wall Street, and the indicators he built — the Accumulation/Distribution Line, the Chaikin Oscillator, the Chaikin Money Flow — continued running on every major trading platform without him.
The Indicators
The technical indicators are the part of Chaikin’s career grounded in mathematical definitions. They are mathematically defined tools that exist in the public domain of every charting platform, and they have been in continuous use since the 1980s.
The Chaikin Money Flow, which he introduced in 1982, measures the degree to which a stock is being accumulated or distributed by institutional buyers. The logic is specific: the real buyers — the market’s most powerful players — typically execute near the end of the trading day, and a stock that closes in the upper half of its daily range on above-average volume is being bought by someone with size. The CMF quantifies that pressure over a rolling window, typically 20 or 21 days, producing a reading between -1 and +1. It is one of the most widely used volume-based indicators in technical analysis, and it appears on almost every charting platform in the world.
The Chaikin Oscillator is a momentum indicator applied to the Accumulation/Distribution Line, measuring the rate of change of money flow. The Chaikin Persistency of Money Flow, a third indicator, became the basis for Investor’s Business Daily’s accumulation/distribution rating, which the newspaper has published for decades as a core feature of its stock-screening methodology.
The indicators matter because they are verifiable in a way that newsletter track records are not. A Bloomberg terminal subscription costs roughly $24,000 a year, and every one of those terminals ships with Chaikin’s indicators installed. The tools are used by hundreds of banks, hedge funds, and brokerages every trading day, and they have been since before the retail newsletter business existed. That is a different category of credibility than a self-reported win rate.
The Comeback and the Power Gauge
The 2008 financial crisis ended the retirement. Chaikin read that $300 billion was being transferred from full-service brokerage accounts to self-directed accounts and online brokers as investors lost faith in their advisors, and he concluded that the people pulling their money out did not have the tools or the temperament to manage it. His son showed him the iPhone, and Chaikin saw the potential of a mobile device delivering institutional-grade analytics to retail investors. He spent a year building a 20-factor quantitative model — 85 percent fundamental, 15 percent technical — that distilled everything he had learned watching institutional money managers into a single rating: Very Bearish, Bearish, Neutral, Bullish, or Very Bullish.
The Chaikin Power Gauge launched on the iPhone App Store in the fall of 2009, and it became the centerpiece of Chaikin Analytics LLC, the firm Chaikin founded to deliver the system to self-directed investors. The rating covers over 5,000 stocks and 2,300 ETFs, scanning each trading day, and it is supported by over ten years of independent backtesting per the company’s materials. The 20 factors span four components: fundamental factors (earnings, valuation), technical factors (relative strength, money flow), expert opinion (analyst ratings, short interest), and sentiment factors (insider activity, institutional ownership). The output is designed to be simple enough for a retail investor to act on while the underlying mathematics are institutional-grade.
MarketWise acquired 90 percent of Chaikin Holdings LLC on January 21, 2021, for $7.139 million net of cash acquired, per SEC filings. The acquisition was folded into a company that already owned Stansberry Research, Brownstone Research, InvestorPlace, and TradeSmith, and MarketWise’s 2021 annual report noted that Chaikin Analytics generated $26.6 million in organic new billings in its first year under the MarketWise umbrella by selling its products to MarketWise’s existing subscriber base. The cross-marketing synergy was immediate: Chaikin’s Power Gauge now reaches Stansberry Research’s audience, and his Stansberry digest appearances are part of that distribution architecture.
The Track Record, Dated
The track record discussion for newsletter publishers always runs into the same wall: no independent audit exists, and the “Report Cards” are self-graded. Chaikin’s case is different in one structural way. The dated market calls are public, the outcomes are verifiable against index data, and the Power Gauge’s real-time ratings on specific stocks are timestamped in a way that self-reported portfolio returns are not.
The 2022 bear market call is the first entry on the ledger. In April 2022, Chaikin wrote in the PowerFeed that a 20 percent broad-market drop was possible and likely. The S&P 500 fell into its first official bear market since the COVID-19 crash, down roughly 20 percent year-to-date by June 2022, with the Nasdaq down 27 percent. The call was directionally correct on both the event and the magnitude.
The 2023 bank run prediction is the one the marketing materials emphasize most heavily. In November 2022, Chaikin shared a prediction at a Chaikin Analytics online event that a major shift in the financial system could lead to a run on the banks in 2023. The Power Gauge had flashed bearish on Silvergate Capital on April 5, 2022, on First Republic Bank on April 1, 2022, on Signature Bank on July 11, 2022, and on SVB Financial on July 25, 2022 — all months before the banks collapsed. The timing was early, the direction was right, and the Power Gauge’s internal ratings are timestamped in the system, which is the kind of evidence that a self-reported newsletter portfolio is not.
The 2023 recovery call is the third. Chaikin published a PowerFeed essay citing a signal with a 95 percent positive rate going back to 1950, projecting an 18 percent S&P 500 return for 2023. The S&P 500 gained 26 percent that year. Directionally correct, conservative on the magnitude.
The March 14, 2026 crash call is the fourth entry, and it is the near-miss. Chaikin forecast a 65 percent probability of a bear market in 2026, with average projected losses of roughly 20 percent from the peak, and identified mid-March as the starting point. The S&P 500 declined approximately 10 percent from its January 28 peak to a March 30 intraday low, which qualifies as a correction but not a bear market, and the index hit new all-time highs by April 15. The call got the dip right and the disaster wrong, and the market rallied more than 20 percent off the low by June. That retrospective is documented in detail in a dated prediction ledger, and the pattern across all four calls is consistent: the directional framework is grounded in real cycle data, the timing has been close, and the magnitude on the miss was half of the projection.
What is not in the ledger is an audited, position-by-position record of every Power Gauge Report recommendation. The industry standard applies: past performance does not guarantee future results, and the track record figures presented in marketing materials are unaudited. The difference is that Chaikin’s indicators and his market-timing calls are externally verifiable in ways that most newsletter gurus’ records are not, because the tools are on Bloomberg and the calls are dated in public publications.
The 2026 Campaign
The active campaign is the 100X Starburst, a conglomerate-breakup thesis packaged as a single stock pick that has been running on CNBC, FOX Business, and Bloomberg with sustained national TV ad spend estimated at $50,000 to $250,000-plus per week. The pitch identifies one stock as the next General Electric-style breakup, claiming exposure to SpaceX, Anthropic, and three other IPO-caliber businesses through a single ticker. The full dimensionalization of the 100X Starburst pitch is covered in a separate promo breakdown, and the March 2026 crash retrospective is a separate entry on the prediction ledger. Both are the spokes; this dossier is the hub.
The Power Gauge Report, the flagship newsletter, is priced at $99 per year for the base tier, with Power Gauge Pro at $399 and Power Gauge Max at $1,200. The pricing sits in the comfortable front-end zone where a 30-day refund window is standard and the product is idea flow rather than wealth management. The 100X Starburst special report is included with the base subscription, which is the marketing hook driving the TV spend. What distinguishes the campaign from most summer 2026 promos is that Chaikin is selling a bullish opportunity thesis in a market where the dominant publisher narrative is AI-debt collapse and economic emergency. That is a differentiated position, and it is the same contrarian streak that called the 2023 recovery when sentiment was bearish.
Reading the Record
Marc Chaikin is the rare newsletter figure whose credibility rests on the indicators themselves. The indicators are real, they are in continuous institutional use, and they predate the newsletter business by decades. The Power Gauge is a genuine quantitative system with a documented backtesting record. The dated market calls have a 3-for-4 directional hit rate with one magnitude miss, which is better than the industry average and verifiable against public index data. The TV ad spend signals that the campaign is converting, which tells you something about the economics of the publisher without telling you anything about the quality of the pick.
The question a reader is actually weighing is whether the Power Gauge system — a 20-factor quantitative rating tool designed to level the playing field between retail investors and institutional desks — translates into actionable, money-making stock selection at the $99 price point. The indicators suggest the analytical foundation is sound. The track record suggests the market-timing framework works more often than it fails. The unaudited newsletter recommendation layer is the part where the verification chain breaks, as it does everywhere in this industry, and the 100X Starburst is a marketing wrapper around a conglomerate-breakup thesis that is creative, speculative, and running on heavy ad spend. The product runs cool while the ads run hot, and understanding that gap before buying is the entire point of reading this file. For the wider pattern of publishers selling AI-powered stock selection in 2026 — a cycle Chaikin’s Power Gauge is part of alongside TradeSmith’s An-E and InvestorPlace’s algorithmic tools — the AI stock picker convergence piece maps the field. For the full gurus index, see Guru Dossiers.