John Slade, 97, Bear Stearns Trader, Wall Street Wise Man, Olympian

John Slade, a Bear Stearns Companies Incorporated executive who joined the firm in 1936 as a $15-a-week runner after arriving from Germany and until last month worked four days a week as a stock trader, died Sunday. He was 97.Slade, the former head of the international, risk arbitrage, and convertible bond departments, kept a desk on the stock-trading floor of Bear Stearns’s headquarters on Madison Avenue.Many investors “think the analyst, strategist, know everything. They know very little,” Slade, a former Olympian, said on May 30, 2003, as he celebrated his 95th birthday by ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “In my opinion, everyone is guessing.”In almost seven decades at Bear Stearns, now the fifth-biggest American securities firm by market value, Slade founded the international department, was made partner in 1951, and became an executive vice president and director in 1985, when the company listed its shares for the first time. He was also honorary chairman of the executive committee.Throughout his career, Slade never lost his zest for making a bet on the market. In the May 2003 interview at the NYSE, he predicted that stocks would keep rising, even after the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index closed that day at an 11-month high. The index rose another 15 percent that year.Born Hans Schlesinger to a successful real-estate broker, Slade, who was Jewish, left Germany for America at 27 after a field hockey team he was due to play against refused to play against Jews. Slade was a member of the U.S. Olympic field hockey team in 1948.“The club’s president told me the team we were playing against didn’t want any Jews on our team,” Slade said in a 2000 interview. “I took that as a sign and decided to leave the country.”He arrived in New York from Germany on March 25, 1936, bearing a letter of recommendation from a former employer who had a nephew at Bear Stearns. Slade started work the next day at Bear Stearns, joining 50 employees. The firm now employs about 11,000 people and is the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm by market value.Slade began recruiting clients by scanning lists of passengers arriving on ships from Germany. “I was able to make contact with those individuals whose names were familiar to me and who might, hopefully, have money in Swiss accounts,” he said. In a few years, he said, he had about 20 clients and became the firm’s foreign-bond trader.Slade, who changed his name after arriving in America, joined the U.S. Army as an interpreter in 1942. He helped interrogate captured Nazi officers in Europe, according to the Traders Magazine article. They included Jurgen Stroop, the general who oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, Slade told the magazine.He rejoined Bear Stearns after the war.In the 1950s, Slade used Telex machines to send weekly messages about markets, economies, and politics to clients in Europe and America, said John Rosenwald, 75, a Bear Stearns vice chairman who worked for Slade in the foreign bond department in 1955 and 1956. The messages always began with the introduction, “John speaking.”Slade kept publishing the missive until his last day at Bear Stearns, about two weeks ago, distributing it to hundreds of clients by e-mail, fax, and regular mail, Rosenwald said.Survivors include his wife, Marianne, whom he married after the death of his first wife, Margit, said his son-in-law, Gerard Weinberg. Other survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Barbara Bolsterli and Nicole Weinberg, and three grandchildren. A private service is planned.

John Slade, 97, Bear Stearns Trader, Wall Street Wise Man, Olympian

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