MARC CHAIKIN

Chaikin started his Wall Street career in the 1960s as a stockbroker. Over the following decades he moved into research and analytics, eventually working at firms including Shearson Hayden Stone, Kidder Peabody, and Drexel Burnham Lambert.

He was there for the go-go years, the junk bond era, the crash of 1987 — all of it.

He developed the Chaikin Money Flow indicator in the 1980s. The CMF measures the amount of Money Flow Volume over a specific period, telling traders whether a stock is being accumulated (bought) or distributed (sold) by institutions.

It became one of the most widely used volume-based indicators in technical analysis. Bloomberg added it to its terminals.

Every retail trading platform from TD Ameritrade to Fidelity eventually included it.

He then developed the Chaikin Oscillator — a momentum indicator based on the MACD of the Accumulation/Distribution Line. Then the Chaikin Power Gauge, his most comprehensive creation: a 20-factor model combining technical and fundamental data to rate stocks from Very Bullish to Very Bearish.

In 2011, he packaged all of this into Chaikin Analytics and went directly to retail and institutional investors. The business has grown steadily, with his Power Gauge appearing on CNBC's Mad Money and in major brokerage platforms.

Chaikin Analytics is his primary company, founded in 2011. It provides the Power Gauge stock rating system, which aggregates 20 factors across four categories: financials, earnings, technicals, and expert opinions.

Subscriptions range from individual investors to institutional clients. Before founding his own firm, he spent decades at various Wall Street brokerages developing quantitative tools for internal trading desks.

Chaikin is fundamentally a technician who respects fundamentals. The Power Gauge is his synthesis: he does not believe you can make decisions from charts alone, but he also does not believe pure fundamental analysis tells you when to act.

His approach uses price action, volume, and institutional money flows to confirm what the fundamentals suggest. If a stock looks cheap fundamentally but institutions are clearly selling, he wants to know why.

Chaikin Money Flow is his signature lens. Large institutions move markets.

When they are accumulating a stock, CMF goes positive. When they are distributing it, CMF goes negative.

Retail investors almost always trade against institutional flow and lose. His tools are designed to help smaller investors see what the big money is doing.

Getting the Chaikin Money Flow indicator adopted by Bloomberg and the major retail brokerage platforms. He built it in the 1980s as an internal tool for institutional traders.

Decades later it ships in every major retail trading platform on earth. Millions of traders use it daily without knowing his name.

That is the kind of quiet influence that compounds over 40 years.

By his own account, staying in the employee model too long. He spent decades building tools for employers that owned the intellectual property.

When he finally built his own firm in 2011, he was in his late 60s. He has said publicly that he wished he had gone independent sooner — the Power Gauge could have existed ten years earlier if he had started building his own business in the 1990s.

Follow the institutions. Retail investors cannot outthink Goldman Sachs analysts or Renaissance Technologies quants on fundamental research.

But they can see the same price and volume data. Learning to read institutional money flow — who is buying, who is selling, how much conviction there is behind a move — levels the playing field in ways that pure fundamental analysis cannot.

The Power Gauge is his answer to the question: how does a regular person know what the smart money is doing?

He lives in the Philadelphia area. He is private about his family but has mentioned his grandchildren in interviews as part of his motivation for building accessible tools — he wants regular people, not just institutional traders, to have professional-grade analytics.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania. He is largely self-taught as a market technician, spending decades in the trenches of Wall Street developing his methodology through direct observation of how institutional money flows through markets.

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