A Tribute to John Murphy

What I did not fully appreciate until recently, watching a video John recorded about intermarket analysis, is just how far back their relationship goes and how strongly he felt about my father’s work. In the video, recorded decades after their initial meeting, John reflected on the importance of intermarket analysis with the same clarity and conviction he brought to everything he did. He described how for almost a century the approach to the markets had been a single market approach, with stock traders only looking at stocks and commodity traders only looking at commodities, and how that way of thinking had become obsolete. He stressed that stocks, commodities, currencies, and fixed income all interrelate, and that ignoring those relationships deprives a trader of tremendously important information.

He then turned his attention to my father. John described how he first discovered my father’s work in the 1980s while working at CNBC: “I read an article that he had published on the subject and I invited him into CNBC, which was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I was really fascinated by his presentation and we became good friends.” He went on to say: “Lou Mendelsohn is one of the pioneers in this area. He’s the first person to really apply the computer and neural networks to the whole matter of intermarket analysis.”

What stood out most was how John framed the significance of what my father had built. With so many intermarket relationships happening at any one time, John explained, “it’s important that you have a vehicle to measure them, and Lou Mendelsohn with his neural networks has really moved onto another dimension.” He then said something that has stayed with me: “I think it’s safe to say that we are the two pioneers in the area of intermarket analysis.” My father was harnessing that technology in the late 1980s, long before the word “AI” entered the mainstream conversation and long before Wall Street institutions even began to consider its possibilities. To hear John Murphy say all of that in his own voice, plainly and generously, is something our family will carry forever.

That early friendship led to a live, nationally broadcast conversation on CNBC on April 22, 1994, where John gave substantive airtime to my father’s concept of synergistic market analysis and the role of neural networks in making intermarket relationships actionable for the average trader. My father laid out a vision of a globally interconnected market where single-market technical analysis was, in his words, very much obsolete. John listened carefully, pressed thoughtfully on the ideas, and told my father on live television: “I tend to agree with you, and that’s the direction my work is going.”

What makes that moment even more remarkable is that John later acknowledged it in print. In the Foreword he wrote to my father’s book, he noted that the term “synergistic market analysis” was one he first heard my father use during that CNBC interview. A conversation between friends on live television became a published acknowledgment in one of the most widely read books in the field.

That Foreword, written for my father’s book Trend Forecasting with Technical Analysis published in 2000, is a remarkable piece of professional generosity. John opens by noting that his own 1991 book on intermarket analysis had once seemed heretical, and that by the end of that decade its ideas had become so accepted that the Market Technicians Association had listed intermarket analysis as a formal branch of technical analysis. He then turns his full attention to my father’s contribution:

“One of Mendelsohn’s greatest contributions to intermarket analysis has been his application of neural networks to the process. He shows how a neural network can take any number of related factors into consideration, analyze them, and draw some practical conclusions. And, those conclusions lead to the real benefit — winning market trades. The results of two decades of pioneering work has produced highly successful intermarket trading programs. Since I was the one who first described these intermarket principles ten years ago, I feel indebted to Mendelsohn for proving that those ideas do in fact work and that they can be profitably applied to the financial markets.” John J. Murphy, Foreword to Trend Forecasting with Technical Analysis

He closed the Foreword with these words, which have stayed with this family and with this company ever since:

“Different times demand different tools. An increasingly interdependent financial marketplace will demand an even better set of tools. It will also demand a more comprehensive approach to market analysis that incorporates all geographic regions and all markets — in other words, an intermarket approach.” John J. Murphy

Those words felt prophetic in 2000. They feel even more so today, as VantagePoint AI now serves over 47,000 traders across more than 120 countries on the strength of exactly that philosophy.

That mutual respect extended powerfully into print. In his masterwork Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets, published in 1999 by the New York Institute of Finance and widely regarded as the definitive reference book in the field, John dedicated an entire section of Chapter 17 to my father’s contributions:

“Louis Mendelsohn was the first person to develop intermarket analysis software in the financial industry during the 1980s. Mendelsohn is the leading pioneer in the application of microcomputer software and neural networks to intermarket analysis. His VantagePoint software, first introduced in 1991, uses intermarket principles to trade interest rate markets, stock indexes, currency markets, and energy futures. VantagePoint uses neural network technology to detect the hidden patterns and correlations that exist between related markets.” John J. Murphy, Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets, Chapter 17, p. 430

To be called the leading pioneer by the man the industry called the father of intermarket analysis, in the very book that generation after generation of traders has used as their foundation, is an honor that cannot be overstated. John did not have to write those words. He wrote them because he believed them.

John’s regard for my father was equally visible in his 2004 book Intermarket Analysis: Profiting from Global Market Relationships, where he chose my father to provide the very first endorsement on the cover, ahead of some of the most respected analysts in the industry. When the most acclaimed author in your field places your name first among all voices on his own book, that is not courtesy. That is conviction.

John Murphy spent seven years as the technical analyst for CNBC, and in doing so he brought chart analysis into millions of homes at a time when most investors had never heard the phrase. He made the complex feel accessible without ever dumbing it down. His books did not just teach people how to read charts. They taught people how to think about markets, how to see the relationships between asset classes, and how to approach the trading day with discipline and perspective. The field of intermarket analysis that John championed is the very intellectual foundation upon which VantagePoint AI was built. In that sense, his legacy lives inside our software every single day.

Growing up and accompanying my father to trading seminars, industry events, and sometimes just being a fly on the wall as he was having business meetings, I came to understand that the trading world is a smaller and more connected community than it might appear from the outside. The fact that two men, both passionate about intermarket relationships and both decades ahead of their time, would find each other in the 1980s, forge a genuine friendship, collaborate across books and television, and publicly declare each other as pioneers is the kind of story that gives me deep pride in this industry and in this company. My father built something remarkable. John Murphy was generous enough to recognize it and say so, plainly and repeatedly, in his own voice and under his own name.

On behalf of my father Louis, our entire team at VantagePoint AI, and the tens of thousands of traders around the world who have been shaped by John Murphy’s teachings, we offer our deepest condolences to his family and our profound gratitude for a life devoted to illuminating the markets. John Murphy made all of us better. We will not forget him.

Lane Mendelsohn
President, VantagePoint AI