Wall Street People
Edited anthology, two volumes
Summary
The reference has not verified this book in detail; the summary states only what the title, author and subject establish.
Ellis and Vertin assembled an anthology of profiles, essays and reminiscences about individuals who shaped American financial markets. The pieces are drawn from books, magazine articles and financial journals rather than written for the collection, and they cover figures ranging from nineteenth-century speculators to twentieth-century money managers, economists and market analysts.
The editorial premise is that markets are made by identifiable people with particular temperaments, and that reading about them conveys something about market behaviour that statistical study does not. Ellis was head of Greenwich Associates and author of Winning the Loser's Game, and Vertin was a portfolio manager and editor at the Financial Analysts Journal, so the selection reflects the professional investment management community's own view of its history.
The collection is uneven by nature, since anthologies of previously published material always are. Individual pieces vary in quality and in how much analysis they contain, and the whole does not build an argument. The reference has not verified the full table of contents or the specific selections.
Its use is as browsing material and as a route to the original sources, since the pieces are attributed and a reader who finds one interesting can go to the book or article it came from. A second volume covering different subjects also exists.
Key takeaways 5
- Financial markets have been shaped by a relatively small number of identifiable individuals whose temperaments left marks on institutions.
- Investment management developed as a profession with its own conventions, and its practitioners have written its history themselves.
- Reading contemporaneous accounts of market participants conveys behavioural information that return data does not.
- The anthology form preserves pieces from journals and out-of-print books that would otherwise be inaccessible.
- Professional investors' own accounts of their predecessors reveal what the profession considers admirable.
Who should read it
Readers who enjoy financial history in short pieces and want a route into older primary sources about market participants.
About Charles D. Ellis
Founder of Greenwich Associates; chair of the Yale endowment investment committee; author of 'The Loser's Game'
His 1975 essay 'The Loser's Game' is the primary source that reframed active management as a negative-sum contest, and the argument is still cited verbatim.
Who recommended it 1 · 1 direct
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