From the Wall Street Journal's Total Return column:
George J.W. Goodman, known as Adam Smith to his readers and Jerry to his friends, died last month, age 83. But his work will outlive him for years, and quite likely decades, to come.Warren Buffett considers Jerry Goodman the second-best writer ever to explain how the investment business works, after the brilliant Fred Schwed, whose Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? (originally published in 1940) remains the finest – and funniest – book on Wall Street ever written.“Schwed was the best ever,” Buffett told me in a telephone interview this past week. “But Jerry, especially in ‘The Money Game,’ was incredibly insightful, and he knew how to make the prose sing as well.“He knew how to put his finger on things that nobody had identified before. Jerry stuck to the facts, but he made them a helluva lot more interesting. He was a great writer.”In The Money Game, the best-selling book he published in 1968, Goodman exposed the frenzied trading, epidemic rumor-mongering and bizarrely neurotic behavior that drove many professional money managers throughout what came to be called the “go-go” years of the bull market of the late 1960s.With a panache no financial writer ever since could hope to match, he cited the mumbo-jumbo of Freudian psychologists, quoted philosophers and poets in untransliterated ancient Greek, and ridiculed Wall Street analysts trying to make sense of momentum stocks with mock names like Murgatroyd Bonbon and Digital Datawhack.How good a writer was Jerry Goodman? You be the judge:A stock is, for all practical purposes, a piece of paper that sits in a bank vault. Most likely you will never see it. It may or may not have an Intrinsic Value; what it is worth on any given day depends on the confluence of buyers and sellers that day. The most important thing to realize is simplistic: The stock doesn’t know you own it. All those marvelous things, or those terrible things, that you feel about a stock, or a list of stocks, or an amount of money represented by a list of stocks, all of these things are unreciprocated by the stock or the group of stocks. You can be in love if you want to, but that piece of paper doesn’t love you, and unreciprocated love can turn into masochism, narcissism, or, even worse, market losses and unreciprocated hate.- The Money Game (1968 edition, p. 81)
...MUCH MORE
Readers who have been with us for a while know we are fans. From the perfect paragraph:
“…For, after all, I had been into cocoa a bit myself. That was back when The Great Winfield had discovered cocoa trading. Occasionally in those more leisured days I would sit with him lazily watching stocks move, like two sheriffs in a rowboat watching catfish in the Tennessee River….”
-'Adam Smith', Supermoney
to extended excerpts, we've tried to show him off when our best wasn't good enough.
And if I ever get around to posting the rest of the cocoa story, with Fat Marvin in Africa on the trail of "Black Pod" "A Dreaded Cocoa Disease" you'll see that Buffett may have overestimated Schwed in the comparison.
