Dennis Gartman Calls Time on Newsletter After More Than 30 Years

(Bloomberg) -- Dennis Gartman plans to halt publication of “The Gartman Letter” after more than three decades of producing his daily investor report.

“There comes a time when retirement calls,” Gartman wrote in Friday’s edition of the newsletter. “The simple sums of information available to everyone have made our efforts difficult and yet easier at the same time. Add to this the increased tax and regulation requirements and we’ve chosen to stop doing business as we have in the past.”

Gartman said he won’t give up TV, radio or print interviews and that a bi-weekly bulletin and podcasts are among the options being considered “to make certain that we are not immediately forgotten.”

Gartman got his start in the early 1970s as an economist at Cotton Inc. before he moved on to roles at NCNB National Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina, and A.G. Becker & Co. in Chicago, according to a bio on the CNBC website. He moved to Virginia in the early 1980s where he ran the futures brokerage operation for Sovran Bank before starting his eponymous newsletter in 1987.

“The Gartman Letter” addressed economic, political and technical trends. Its subscribers include hedge funds, banks, brokerage firms and mutual funds, among others.

“Dennis cut his teeth in the commodity markets. While I was learning the business back in the ‘90s, he was always a fantastic read to understand what was going on outside the equity markets,” said Dave Lutz, a managing director and head of ETF trading at JonesTrading in Annapolis, Maryland. “His letter was always insightful, full of insider knowledge.”

Like everyone making predictions about markets, Gartman made calls that didn’t always pan out, and he has taken more than his share of social media lumps for wrong-way forecasts. In February 2018, he lamented putting the volatile stock Riot Blockchain Inc. into his retirement account -- just a couple months after saying on CNBC that Bitcoin was nonsense and he wouldn’t buy or sell any. Emails and calls to Gartman went unanswered Friday.

On the other hand, his prediction in July 2018 that the then-struggling Dow Jones Industrial Average was merely in a consolidation phase on the way to 30,000 amid an ongoing bull market doesn’t look so bad, with the gauge currently above 28,000.

--With assistance from Vildana Hajric, Joanna Ossinger and Brendan Walsh.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sam Potter in London at spotter33@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sam Potter at spotter33@bloomberg.net, Chris Nagi, Paul Dobson

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