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It Was a Very Good Year: Extraordinary Moments in Stock Market History (Wiley Investment)
 
 
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It Was a Very Good Year: Extraordinary Moments in Stock Market History (Wiley Investment) [Hardcover]

Martin S. Fridson CFA (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Book Description

December 22, 1997 0471174009 978-0471174004 1
What, if anything, do the most spectacular, high-performance periods of the twentieth-century stock market have in common? And most importantly: Can we predict when they will occur again?

In this fascinating investigation, acclaimed author and financial authority Martin S. Fridson probes the past, leading an exhilarating tour through each of the twentieth-century stock market's golden years. Illuminating, entertaining, and rich in historical anecdotes, Fridson's book treats us to the opinions and investment strategies of some of the most prominent and intriguing figures on the scene.

"Timely, informative, and highly readable . . . It Was a Very Good Year offers wonderful insights into the years that provided spectacular gains in the past. There are important lessons in this book for all investors."-Henry Kaufman, President, Henry Kaufman & Company, Inc.

"A useful and extremely entertaining book. It's loaded with fascinating stock market lore and helpful investment approaches. I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed myself along the way."-Byron R. Wien, Managing Director, Investment Strategist for U.S. Equities, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter

"Financial history with a purpose-it is a Very Good Book."-James Grant, Editor, Grant's Interest Rate Observer

"With this book, Marty Fridson joins the ranks of the must-read economic and financial historians. He is that rare combination of scholar, wit, raconteur, and man with an eye on the bottom line. Read it for amusement, education, or profit. You can't lose."-Ben Stein, writer, law professor at Pepperdine University and host of Win Ben Stein's Money


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Popular wisdom holds that, over time, the stock market outperforms any other method of investment, the key words being "over time"; folks who look to the stock market to get rich quickly are definitely playing with fire. Still, for those who like to live on the edge, Martin S. Fridson's book It Was a Very Good Year might offer some helpful hints for predicting a bumper year on Wall Street. Firstly, there are certainly patterns--most years in which stocks performed extraordinarily well began with extremely depressed stock prices--but never any guarantees. Fridson, an analyst and managing director at Merrill Lynch, illustrates this principle with plenty of anecdotes about those who struck it rich--and those who didn't. It Was a Very Good Year offers interesting and entertaining information about what makes the stock market tick but presents no ironclad system for making it big on Wall Street.

From Library Journal

Looking back over ten of the U.S. stock market's best years of the century, from 1908 to 1995, the author examines patterns while capturing the common themes he feels might explain the phenomenon of the "bull-market" years. (LJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 22, 1997)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0471174009
  • ISBN-13: 978-0471174004
  • Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,801,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Those Who Don't Learn From History....., June 11, 2004
By 
frankbif "frankbif" (Wesley Hills, New York United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: It Was a Very Good Year: Extraordinary Moments in Stock Market History (Wiley Investment) (Hardcover)
It Was a Very Good Year" is an interesting anthology of financial market stories. Martin Fridson elects to choose one excellent-performing year and analyze all of the personalities, factors, and influences that tugged upward and downward on the stock market in that time period. The author chooses a diverse selection of years, usually spanning a decade or so apart, but occasionally choosing two years fairly close to one another. This book reminds me of those sports books we all read as youngsters, where the author focused on one team of each decade.

The book provides fascinating history of the early market years, especially 1908 (following the Panic of 1907) and 1927-28 (The Roaring Twenties). Savvy investors like Bernard Baruch and Benjamin Graham as well as disreputable con artists are profiled. Wall Street investment pools and trusts, financial journals long gone ("The Magazine of Wall Street"), and brokerage houses long since merged are profiled and looked at periodically in different time periods. The changing histories and interplay of Ford, GM, and IBM are looked at over the decades of American economic performance.

Some interesting factoids: Did you know that adjusted for inflation, a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1928 sold for $6 million (prices got as high as 1/3rd that amount in 1999-2000)? That Radio Corporation of America went from $101 in 1929 to $2 1/2 in 1932? That General Motors, the dot.com of it's day, went up 150-fold from 1918-1928? That Tim Mara, original co-owner of the New York Giants football team (his brother, Wellington, still runs the team today), was on the hook for $50,000 for loans to Al Smith's 1928 presidential campaign and told the Crash-troubled bank they could "go to hell" before he'd pay it (all the co-signers had been told that a Smith victory was assured and that they'd never have to make good on the note)? That the 1958 IPO of Desilu Studios (Lucy and Desi Arnaz, "I Love Lucy," "The Untouchables," etc) was one of the most successful ever -- though Desi's hiring of Walter Winchell as the announcer on "The Untouchables" was a factor in breaking up their marriage (Winchell had once alluded to Ball's communist background and caused her lots of problems)? These and numerous other interesting financial, economic, business, cultural, and political tidbits are dispersed throughout the book and make it a very easy and fast read.

This book is not so much a financial review of select years in American history as it is a cultural, corporate, personality, and political review of the times. Fridson has a wealth of information on the major economic and financial factors of the day, but the strength of the book is his ability to intersperse lots of interesting offbeat facts, cultural references, and names from bygone eras and thus hold the reader's attention.

If you like financial markets, you'll love this book. If you like financial market history, you'll love it even more. And if you're not interested in financial markets, but just want to take a stroll down alot of Memory Lanes, you're bound to pick up some interesting knowledge from various slices of American history that will benefit you the next time you are playing Trivial Pursuit.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Wish I had read it sooner, December 21, 2005
A very thoroughly researched and well written book. I wish I would have read it sooner, before the market bottomed in 2002. With the historical descriptions in the book, an investor could have spotted the conditions for a great investment opportunity.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars An empiricist history, December 22, 2007
This book is about the ten best stock market years of the 20th century. I didn't expect any miraculous set of pointers on identifying a great stock market year. However, one expects a historian to do more merely than report discrete facts. One would expect a set of common threads running through the descriptions of these ten years, explaining their similarities and differences. Instead, what one sees is like brief snippets of market-related events in each of the years (and some unrelated events too), with no coherent narrative.

I admit I couldn't bring myself to read it all. I stopped and skipped to the last Epilogue that tries to sum things up (too late). That was brief and unsatisfactory.

Not a book I'd recommend to any audience for any purpose.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
It is not to be expected, or even hoped, that our industries will at once, or in the very near future, rebound to the dangerous height where they were when the recent crash came. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
money panic, valuation standards, broker loans
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Wall Street, New York, Federal Reserve, United States, General Motors, Business Week, Dow Jones Industrial Average, New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, White House, Lucien Hooper, Supreme Court, Very Good Years, Great Crash, Herbert Hoover, Ben Graham, Calvin Coolidge, Heinz Biel, The Trader, Walter Winchell, Alan Greenspan, American Review of Reviews, National Industrial Recovery Act, Richard Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt
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