Customer Reviews

100 Minds That Made the Market (Fisher Investments Press)

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100 great biographies of the most influential personalities that affect the markets even today. If you're interested in how our markets developed from it's chaotic beginning this is a great book. I particularly enjoyed the section on crooks and scams. It's amazing some of the things people will do.

This is a great book for reading the short bios of the financial history makers. I just picked and chose the people I was interested in reading about.

I didnt expect to learn much from a book that summarizes a great mind in only three to four pages. However, I also didnt expect the author, or editors employed by the successful fund manager/author/columnist to adopt that tabloid style to drill into the personal life rather than the investing/trading/business success of each. For e.g. on Benjamin Graham, "Meanwhile, Graham was also busy bustling between his homes in La Jolla, California and Provence, France, where he ultimately died in the company of his long time French mistress, whom he'd courted away from his son!" I had not read through the whole book, but similar "insulting style" was applied on Bernard Baruch, Jesse Livermore and William Gann, of which I had studied before. If you read to sharpen your edge, I strongly recommend you to put your valuable time and money somewhere else.

Some people are hard to buy gifts for. With books, there is often a trade-off between books that say a lot, and those that people are willing to read. One book that I think hits the sweet spot is 100 Minds That Made The Market, by Ken Fisher.

Why do I think this? This book is 100 little books in one volume. You can pick this book up for five minutes, and read a well-written 3-4 page biography of person who has had a significant impact on how our markets work today. Then you can put it down, get back to work, and think that you have learned something significant.

When I read this book back in the late '90s, I recognized about half of the people who were profiled in the book. I felt that I learned a lot in a short amount of time.

Consider the categories of people that the book deals with:

* The greats of the distant past (late 18th Century to mid 19th Century)
* Investment Writers and Data Publishers
* Famous investment bankers
* Bankers
* Central Bankers
* New Deal Regulators
* Swindlers, Scamps, Rogues, and Thieves
* Statisticians, Economists, and Nuts
* Successful Entrepreneurs and Speculators
* Unsuccessful Entrepreneurs and Speculators
* Notable Oddballs
* And more

The biographies are well-written and concise. They illustrate eras in Western, and in particular, American Capitalism. Many of the names are obscure in the present day, but after you read the biography, you have no doubt that they were important to their era.

I enjoyed the book greatly, and hope that you will too.