Fidelity Investments: “Last good money-related book you read — GO” [3 Articles]
~ Friday, September 29, 2023 Blog Post ~
I took part in this tweet by Fidelity Investments this week. The social media post read:
“Last good money-related book you read — GO”
The tweet had more than 40 replies from X users. The titles I encountered included:
- The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 by William Robert Scott (My response)
2. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
3. The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
4. Dumb Money by Ben Mezrich
5. Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism by Christine Desan
6. Cardano for the Masses by John Greene
7. On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Hank Paulson
8. The Intelligent REIT Investor Guide: How to Sleep Well at Night with Safe and Reliable Dividend Income by Brad Thomas
9. Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel
10. Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes by Tom Wheelwright
11. The Art of Speculation by Philip L. Carret
12. Playing Blackjack as a Business by Lawrence Revere
13. The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
14. You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero
15. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin
16. The Berenstain Bears’ Trouble with Money by Stan and Jan Berenstain
17. What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard
18. Teddy and the Piggy Banks by Ryan Cohen
19. How to Get Paid for What You Know: Turning Your Knowledge, Passion, and Experience Into an Online Income Stream in Your Spare Time by Graham Cochrane
20. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
21. How to Grow Marijuana Indoors in a Small Space From Start to Finish: Simple and Easy — Anyone can do it! by Addison Edge and Gene Guzman
22. Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
23. Bitcoin: And the Future of Money by Jose Pagliery
24. Predictable Patterns: A Biotech Trading Playbook by AJ Black
25. Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street’s Failure to Deliver by Dr. Susanne Trimbath
It would be nice if I take my time including images of the finance and business-related books mentioned in the X post’s replies here in my blog entry. I’ll do that when I have the pleasure of time.
Anyway, I like Fidelity Investments’ latest tweet. It provided me with more ideas of the money-related books I might be interested in reading when I have free hours. This blog entry is a welcome addition to my blog post collection which also includes my entries of finance-related book lists.
These blog posts comprise:
2. Collecting Greed Quotes from My Book about the British Empire
4. Suze Orman’s Books — “The Laws of Money, The Lessons of Life,” ETC.
5. “The Mathematics of Money” by Timothy J. Biehler
6. “The Millionaire Next Door” Summary and Review (From Lifeclub.org)
7. Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” and “Hard Times” novels
9. “How to Invest” Book by David Rubenstein / My List of Relevant Finance, Wealth, and Investment Books
10. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki Books, etc.
12. Personal Finance Books for Filipino Savers and Investors [4 Images]
13. Revisiting my old personal finance books [4 Images]
14. Andrew Tobias’s Personal Finance Books
Here is an article featuring the book, “The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720” by William Robert Scott:
Article #2: Good companies (From The Spectator)
By Merryn Somerset Webb, November 3, 2016
William Robert Scott’s The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720; John Littlewood’s The Stock Market: 50 Years of Capitalism at Work
A year or so ago a friend gave me a fabulous present: a full set of the 1968 edition of the three volumes of The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 by William Robert Scott. I accept that not everyone would find this fabulous. But if you have even the faintest of interests in how modern capitalism came to be organised as it is, you’ll be hanging on to the edge of your seat long before you get to volume two.
The idea of a company existing in which you could own a fractional part — or share — first appeared in the British Isles in the mid-1550s — with the Russia (or Muscovy) Company being the first properly successful version (it had its ups and downs but hung on until 1917). It was fast followed by Mines Royal, the Mineral and Battery Works, the East India Company, the New Scotland Company and many thousands of others in 200 years of excitement, experimentation, boom and bust (a large number of chapter headings start with the words, ‘The crisis of…’ ). I have favourite bubbles from the book — the diving bell bubble of the 1690s comes top — and favourite companies, too: in 1676, the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay managed to turn £650 into £19,000 by trading furs with Indians.
But the key reason to read Scott’s book is for the extraordinary detail and the understanding that it brings of how ‘early companies were affected by, and in their turn affected the national life’ at every turn. Companies interacted with the state endlessly — helping monarchs raise money, running monopolies with them (companies routinely had a go at applying for the ‘little further encouragement’ monopolies gave their businesses), lobbying for licences and loans, and so on.
Without the rise of joint stock companies and the markets on which to trade their shares, the risk of the foreign adventures and start-ups that made Britain a great trading nation would have been impossible for anyone to take on. And without governments to chuck some regulation into the mix, the risk of investing in any of those adventures would have been even higher than it was.
And it was already high. Note the words of a Mrs Mary Butterfield on some 1719 accounting shenanigans affecting the price of her shares in Hudson Bay: ‘I cannot tell you how it is to be done for that passes my wit,’ she wrote, ‘but in short, the value of our interests is to be trebled without our paying a farthing.’ A chapter to read if you need a reminder on why company accounts only ever tell you part of every story.
The only shame of Scott’s book is that it stops in 1720 with the collapse of the South Sea bubble — and so leaves a 225-year gap before the story of the equity markets is picked up in The Stock Market: 50 Years of Capitalism at Work by John Littlewood. Still, once you get into Littlewood’s book you will find you are on familiar ground: it is as intensely detailed as Scott’s.
It takes you from the herding behaviour of early 1950s fund managers — shunning equities and holding cash mountains as a ‘defensive mechanism that deflects criticism for failing to read market trends when everyone fails together’ — on to the cult of equity that has lasted us almost ever since, via the horrors of the 1970s, the Big Bang and privatisations of the 1980s and the rise of London in the 1990s to be the ‘hub of the wheel’ of finance.
Along the way, the appearance of the market has been completely transformed: ‘The daily routine in the 1950s of drifting into a splendidly furnished partners’ office has become in the 1990s a mass meeting for several hundred in the amphitheatre of the modern trading floor.’ But the essence of it remains the same: creative accounting and investor psychology get us just as many crisis chapters in Littlewood as in Scott.
These aren’t how-to-invest books. They are books about the history of the systems we use to shift capital around. But read them and you will also most certainly end up a much better investor.
References:
https://www.abebooks.com/9781334243783/Constitution-Finance-English-Scottish-Irish-1334243786/plp
https://twitter.com/Fidelity/status/1707077764401033291
https://web.archive.org/web/20181029054917/https://life.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/good-companies/
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