September 11, 1923 – February 22, 2023
By Scott C. Tips
The first time I ever saw Harry Schultz he was walking in the Fontvieille district of Monaco. That must have been around 1997. I was just returning home from a grocery-shopping foray to the large Carrefour supermarket there and was surprised to spot him, large as life, out of my car window as I drove past him. I had already been a subscriber to his The International Harry Schultz Letter since 1979, owned several of his books, and I knew what he looked like, so I was sure that was him. Since he was local, I determined that I would meet him. And I did.
He responded to my letter and consented to meet with me, which we did at a brasserie in Monaco. We both had tea, as I remember, and our discussion was wide-ranging and deep, shifting from politics to economics to philosophy to investing and all the way to women (yes, we both agreed, you cannot live without them!). Once his guard was down, Harry was friendly, warm, and we immediately became fast friends, a friendship that was to last for 26 years. A treasure trove of information, his mind was sharp and receptive to new ideas, even unto death. He was always learning, just as he was always teaching.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and reared in California, Harry served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and was stationed at its end in Shanghai, China, where he learned to trade in the stock and currency markets, amassing a small fortune through his trades on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. He then parlayed that money into a newspaper purchase in Palm Springs, California. At one time he owned 13 newspapers and was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.
Although publishing was in his blood, his genius for making money trading stocks and currencies only sharpened with time and he seemed to increasingly focus on using those skills. He developed a financial consultancy business based on technical stock analysis and hard-money assets and charged $2,000 per hour for his advice. He was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest paid financial consultant in the World, a distinction he enjoyed until his death. His market “Bible” – a copy of which he convinced me to purchase many years ago – was Edwards and Magee’s Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, now in its 11th edition.
A true maverick in every sense of the word, Harry was a hard-core libertarian, a voracious reader, and very knowledgeable and outspoken on all subjects. He coined the term “Stagflation” to describe the worst-of-both-worlds situation where an economy is confronted with slow growth, high unemployment, and inflation. Harry believed in decentralizing nations, the smaller the better – the exact opposite of today’s global-government advocates. Most of all, he believed in the benefits of dietary supplements, health freedom, and the goals of the National Health Federation, several times mentioning the Federation in his financial newsletter and, at my request, becoming NHF’s Financial Advisor in the Summer 2005.
Harry wrote a number of books, including Bear Markets: How to Survive and Make Money in Them (1964), Handbook for Using & Understanding Swiss Banks (1970), Panics & Crashes and How You Can Make Money out of Them (1972), Financial Tactics and Terms for the Sophisticated International Investor (1974),and On Re-making the World: Cut Nations Down to Size (1991). And, as an iconic figure, he was mentioned or depicted in many other books, such as Matlock and Silber’s Who’s Who in Hard Money Economics (1980) and Arthur Hailey’s bestselling 1975 novel The Moneychangers.
Harry influenced and helped people worldwide. I remember one Autumn, he called me out of the blue and insisted that I sell all of my short positions in the market. I did, and that one phone call saved me thousands of dollars that I otherwise would have lost. Even though he traded the markets using technical analysis, he seemed to have an instinctive and intuitive grasp of market currents and trends.
Sadly, near the end of his life, I saw very little of my friend Harry. I had moved away from his normal haunts and his own mobility had declined. We mostly traded emails for a while. But, year after year passed and Harry kept celebrating his birthdays, the last of which I was able to attend in 2011. I was rooting for him to reach 100. Then, this year, I received word from his wife Joy that he had died peacefully, in bed, and surrounded by family and friends. He was 99-1/2 years old.
Leave a Reply