100 Minds That Made the Market

In 100 Minds That Made the Market, Ken Fisher delivers cameo biographies of these pioneers of American financial history. From Joe Kennedy’s “sexcapades” to Jesse Livermore’s suicide, this book details the drama, the dirt, and the financial principles of an amazingly inventive group of financial minds. Fisher digs deep to uncover the careers, personal lives, and contributions of these individuals, and leads you through the lessons that can be learned from each one. Here you have 100 of the best teachers — some you already know, some you will feel you know, and some you may not have previously discovered — whose experiences will undoubtedly enhance your understanding of the markets.

Author’s Note:

100 Minds is presented in a form that chronicles Wall Street’s evolution. Eleven categories (chapters) describe people who laid the basis for the institution; those who chronicled its growth and the deal-makers who financed it; those who innovated it; and those who assimilated it into the American economy. Then came those who reformed it, systematized it, scandalized it, and those who made and lost money in it; plus a few miscellaneous others. Within each category, the stories are presented in chronological order so you can follow the flow of time.

It’s important to remember that the categories aren’t as important as the people themselves. In writing the book, the people were chosen first and categorized later. The descriptions of each of them needed to stand on their own as cameo biographies before being fitted into any particular framework. Only after the 100 were written were they placed into groups that logically flowed from the stories themselves; then chapter summaries were written to bring the 100 together with overarching themes and lessons.

As important, I wanted you to be able to choose between reading the book cover-to-cover and just picking it up from time to time for a quickie on a single person whenever someone becomes of interest to you. As a writer of two previous books, a columnist in Forbes for eight years, and an author of a lot of other material, I hope 100 Minds is entertaining and educating enough to be worthwhile to many of you in a cover-to-cover format. But I am also mindful of how many more things I would like to do than I ever have time for and presume the same is true for you. By putting it in a format where you need not read it cover-to-cover, I am freeing you to use whatever bits of the book benefit you most. If one day someone mentions Lucky Baldwin and you haven’t the foggiest as to who he was, you can save yourself the embarrassment of asking or doing a lot of library legwork by simply flipping to the index and reading a four-minute cameo story. If you want to read further about Baldwin, just flip to the appendix where there’s a bibliography for each story that shows you where to go next. And if you want to find more subjects like Baldwin, just browse around his chapter.

Many of these fascinating folks can actually be placed into several different categories. How can you put J.P. Morgan into one box? And Ben Graham was an author, but he was much more, as were so many of these great pioneers. Yet I had to categorize them somewhere and did so where they made most sense to me. If you see it differently, I beg for your patience. Also note that many of these lives are interrelated, so when one subject is mentioned in another’s story, he or she is cross-referenced by boldfacing their name upon first reference, so you can quickly flip to that story for more.

100 Minds That Made the Market By Kenneth Fisher pdf