The original weekly show hosted by Louis Rukeyser aired each Friday evening on PBS in the United States from November 20, 1970, to 2005.

The original show, which was created by Anne Truax Darlington and produced by Maryland Public Television (MPT), debuted on the entire PBS network on November 20, 1970, and was officially titled Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser (W$W) during the 32 years he hosted from November 20, 1970, to March 22, 2002 (the "S" in "Street" was rendered and officially titled in television listings with a dollar sign).

[2] The new "Wall Street Week" featured Anthony Scaramucci and Morgan Stanley senior advisor Gary Kaminsky as co-hosts.

Some of the guests included Stan Weinstein (editor of The Professional Tape Reader), Peter Lynch (manager of the Magellan funds at Fidelity Investments), and Dick Fabian (editor for "The Telephone Switch Newsletter") With the new hosts came a change in format: The new show's theme music was an updated, more orchestral version of "TWX in 12 Bars", produced again by Don Swartz and Don Barto.

Without Louis Rukeyser as host, this new version suffered from lower ratings, neither capturing a new more youthful market as PBS had intended, nor retaining the original viewers.

Rukeyser irreverently named the index "The Elves" (a reference to the term Gnomes of Zurich), and dubbed Nurock the "Chief Elf."

In 1998, one magazine even suggested the Elves Index was more useful as a contrarian tool, citing three examples where buy signals were followed by periods of market drift or contraction.

The show rapidly grew in coverage and viewers until it became one of the most popular programs on the newly created PBS member stations.

[citation needed] At its peak in the 1980s, the program aired on over 300 stations, and claimed a viewership of 4,100,000 households, which meant more people watched WSW every week than read the Wall Street Journal.

However, in 1987, Prof. Robert Pari of Bentley College published an academic article in the Journal of Portfolio Management detailing the results of a study that found that stocks recommended by Rukeyser's guests on Wall Street Week not only tended to rise in price and trading volume in the days preceding the Friday evening broadcast, peaking on the Monday afterward, but thereafter those stocks tended to drop in price and under-perform the market for up to a year following the recommendation.

[6] Rukeyser strongly disputed this claim, but ten years later Professors Jess Beltz and Robert Jennings published another academic article in the Review of Financial Economics reporting results consistent with Pari's original findings, and that there was "little correlation between the 6-month performance of a recommendation and the abnormal volume at the date the recommendation is made."

In 1980 Rukeyser explained his hosting philosophy to The New York Times as, "I am talking to one person, whom I regard as intelligent, with a good sense of humor, but not all that technically knowledgeable.

[citation needed] By 2001 viewership was down to 1,500,000 households and demographics showed that the average WSW viewer was 65 years old (about the same age as Rukeyser).

In 2011, Maryland Public Television anchor Jeff Salkin licensed the name to start a website offering video interviews and newsletters for an annual fee.

[13] The first episode featured special guest "bond king" Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital and panelists Liz Ann Sonders (who was a frequent panelist on the original "Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser") of Charles Schwab and Jonathan Beinner of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Gundlach's commentary on the show, where he called for a potential crash in the junk bond market, made news across Wall Street following the premiere.

[15] Scaramucci stepped away from his position hosting the show after Donald Trump added him to his transition team as an economic advisor.

As with the previous Fox edition, a newly recorded version of the "TWX In 12 Bars" theme was commissioned for this latest series.