Financial journalist who wrote movingly about his final illness

The much respected financial journalist Charles Fell, always known as Charlie, who has died aged 46 after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer, made a notable contribution in the last year of his life in publicising the realities of life with the disease and the shortcomings in treating it in Ireland.

Writing in this newspaper’s Health and Family supplement in June, he described how, having been brought in as an emergency case to St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin in 2013, he had been told abruptly, and without his family present, that he would “probably” die.

After surgery described as “successful” and six months of exhausting chemotherapy, Fell described how his impending demise became an “intolerable” anxiety resulting in “a prolonged depression” and the dread of the “nightmares that were virtually certain to plague me”.

Communication

His article implicitly raised the issue of how doctors should communicate with cancer patients, and the related issue of counselling.

He did, eventually, get help from the Purple House Cancer Support Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, and was appreciative of his later treatment at St Vincent’s.

Fell also appeared on RTÉ Radio 1's Sean O'Rourke Show in July and remarkably, six days before his death, delivered a lecture on his experience, aided by his brother John, at the UCD Smurfit Business School.

At his funeral, his old friend and former colleague Mick Dunne told the congregation that it was “inspirational” to see Fell there “advocating for others, in what he knew to be his final days”.

Charles Fell was born in Dublin, one of two sons of Frank Fell, an economist, and Gemma Mortimer and was educated at Clonkeen College, Deansgrange, and UCD, where he graduated with a BComm and later a master’s degree in finance.

There followed 14 years with the Ulster Bank’s investment management section before he set up his own consultancy in 2003, Sequoia Markets, a name which perhaps reflected his acknowledged expertise in US investments.

He also began lecturing in finance at a diverse range of universities and business schools, including Dublin City University, Trinity College, Dublin, the Smurfit Business School, Manchester Business School, and also in Asia.

In 2006, he joined The Irish Times as writer of the weekly Serious Money column, gaining a devoted readership for seven years for cautious, well-researched advice before illness forced him to take a break in 2013.

Hope and optimism

One fan, writing on his return in October of that year, made a salient point which perhaps highlighted the essence of his expertise: “he prevents hope from transforming itself into optimism”.

Irish Times deputy business editor Dominic Coyle underlined this assessment when he wrote this week that Fell "saw himself … as a grounded counterpoint to … the herd mentality that passed for analysis among large sections of the professional forecasting community".

He was interested, he added, in alerting investors to the folly of “making decisions based on media headlines or analyst soundbites”, seeking instead “to highlight issues relevant to a particular market or investment decision that had been glossed over in the rush to jump on a bandwagon”.

Fell had a lifelong passion for soccer, being a fan of Ipswich Town and a coach of underage teams at Grenada AFC, a Dublin junior club.

He was married to Ann Casey, a civil servant, who survives him, as do his brother and parents.