Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I was extreamly happy to find such a well researched book. It was interesting, and yet it stuck to to facts and kept the reader informed. I am looking forward to reading more by the authur.

Investment world has so many unforgettable story which every investor can learn valuable lessons from it. This book will provide you very insightful descriptions about stock market history in the past century. Readers should benefit a lot and create fortune by examining pros and cons of every good year. Also, it is a very, very good timing to study this book since 2002 maybe a GOOD YEAR.

Excellent book, with a great quantity of usefull historical information. Congratulations Martin !!!!