His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was confirmed by the Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. The cause was cardiogenic shock, a heart condition, his family told The Associated Press.  A scrappy, Runyonesque figure who spoke a breathless Brooklynese, Mr. Dorfman was for much of the 1990s considered the most influential stock tipster in the country. He was best known as the host of the series of three-minute market reports that CNBC broadcast over the course of each trading day.  Long before that, Mr. Dorfman had been an influential voice in business journalism. In the late 1960s and early ’70s he wrote The Wall Street Journal’s stock column Heard on the Street. He later wrote New York magazine’s Bottom Line column, Esquire’s Full Disclosure column, a nationally syndicated column for The Daily News of New York and a column for USA Today.  On television, he appeared regularly on “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser,”’ broadcast on PBS, and on CNN’s “Moneyline.”  Mr. Dorfman’s CNBC report, which offered a potent mix of news, gossip and tips, was estimated to have reached half a million viewers daily. His assessment of any given company, whether bullish or bearish, could significantly affect its stock price within minutes.  As a result, his career became a study in microcosm of both the power and the perils of market journalism.  In a 1994 article about Mr. Dorfman’s CNBC reports, The Washington Post wrote: “During the past 18 months, more than 95 percent of the stocks recommended on the reports have increased in price dramatically — by an average of about 13 percent — usually within five minutes of Dorfman’s report. Companies knocked have quickly dropped in value by about the same percentage.”  So great was his influence that for a time in the mid-1990s, the Chicago Stock Exchange observed what became known as the Dorfman rule, which aimed to pour oil on the roiling market waters his report could create. Under the rule, small-order computerized trading of any stock mentioned on Mr. Dorfman’s broadcast was suspended for the next few minutes.  The CNBC reports, together with his monthly column in Money magazine, made Mr. Dorfman one of the highest-paid financial journalists of the 1990s. In 1995, The New York Times put his combined income from the two jobs at $900,000 a year.  Mr. Dorfman broke big stories. In 1989, writing in USA Today, he was the first to report the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications.  He sometimes made big blunders. In 1995, he reported on CNBC that the Coca-Cola Company planned to offer the Quaker Oats Company $60 a share in a takeover bid. As a result of the report, Quaker shares jumped $4.50 to close at $36.125.  In response, Coca-Cola, which said it planned no such bid, issued a statement described by The Times as “one of the most blunt, and most colloquial, communiqués from a Fortune 500 company in recent memory.” It read, in part, “Dan Dorfman does not have a clue.”  In an interview with The Times, Mr. Dorfman called the statement “a dumb reaction from a classy company.”  By the mid-1990s, Mr. Dorfman had become the target of allegations in the financial news media that he was influenced — wittingly or unwittingly — by sources who sought to manipulate stock prices. In a 1995 article that attracted wide notice, Business Week magazine reported that he was the subject of a federal investigation into “possible illegal insider trading” and other violations of securities laws.  The investigation was reported to center on Mr. Dorfman’s ties to Donald Kessler, a New York stock promoter and personal friend. Mr. Kessler, Business Week reported, typically charged his clients tens of thousands of dollars to meet Mr. Dorfman; Mr. Dorfman was said to have reported positively on some of Mr. Kessler’s clients on CNBC and in Money magazine.  In 1996, amid the federal investigation — and amid Mr. Dorfman’s subsequent refusal to disclose to his editors at Money magazine the sources on which he relied for his columns — Money let him go.  Mr. Dorfman was not charged in the federal investigation, and an in-house review by NBC, CNBC’s corporate parent, found no evidence of wrongdoing. (Mr. Kessler later pleaded guilty to securities fraud and tax evasion charges.)  After suffering a mild stroke in 1996, Mr. Dorfman did not return to CNBC.  Daniel Donald Dorfman was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 24, 1929. (Many sources list the year erroneously as 1930 or 1931.) He said in interviews that after his parents divorced when he was a young child, he spent two years in an orphanage before rejoining his mother.  Mr. Dorfman attended the New York School of Printing, a vocational high school in Manhattan, and served in the Army. After his discharge, he was hired as a copy boy at Fairchild Publications. He later covered retailing for Women’s Wear Daily before becoming a business reporter for The New York Herald Tribune.  After leaving Money and CNBC, Mr. Dorfman wrote variously for Financial World magazine; The New York Sun, a newspaper whose print edition was published from 2002 to 2008; JagNotes.com, an online stock-tip site; and The Huffington Post.  Mr. Dorfman’s first marriage, to Iris Cherney, ended in divorce; their only child, Leah Dorfman Kelly, died in 2008. Survivors include his second wife, the former Harriet Kasenetz.
Mr. Dorfmanâs televised market reports could send a stock soaring â or plummeting â but his career was tarnished by accusations of insider trading.