Henry Blodget

Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American businessman, investor, journalist, and author.

He is a former equity research analyst who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch during the dot-com era. Due to his violations of securities laws and subsequent civil trial conviction, Blodget is permanently banned from involvement in the securities industry. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of Business Insider, a business news aggregator site, as well as a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.

Blodget was born and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a commercial banker. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Yale University, where he was a member of The Society of Orpheus and Bacchus. After college, he taught English in Japan, then moved to San Francisco to try to be a writer while supporting himself by giving tennis lessons. He was also a freelance journalist and a proofreader for Harper's Magazine.

In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998 he predicted that Amazon, then trading at $240, would trade for $400 within a year. This was thought highly unlikely by many traders at the time; however, just three weeks later Amazon's stock passed that mark (a gain of 128%).

This call received significant media attention. Two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch, and frequently appeared on CNBC and other similar shows. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.

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