Where Are the Customers' Yachts? or a Good Hard Look at Wall Street Hardcover - 1995 - 1st Edition

From the rear cover

"Once I picked it up I did not put it down until I finished . . . What Schwed has done is capture fully--in deceptively clean language--the lunacy at the heart of the investment business."--From the Foreword by Michael Lewis, Bestselling author of Liar's Poker

This hilarious portrait of everyday Wall Street and its denizens rings as true today as it did when it was first published in 1940. Writing with a rare mixture of wry cynicism and bonhomie reminiscent of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, Fred Schwed, Jr., skewers everyone including himself in his brilliant send-ups of bankers, brokers, traders, investors, analysts, and hapless customers.

Critical Praise . . .

"How great to have a reissue of a hilarious classic that proves the more things change the more they stay the same. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."--Michael Bloomberg, President, Bloomberg, LP

". . . one of the funniest books ever written about Wall Street."--Jane Bryant Quinn, The Washington Post

"It's amazing how well Schwed's book is holding up after 55 years. About the only thing that's changed on Wall Street is that computers have replaced pencils and graph paper. Otherwise, the basics are the same. The investor's need to believe somebody is matched by the financial advisor's need to make a nice living. If one of them has to be disappointed, it's bound to be the former."--John Rothchild, Author, A Fool and His Money Financial Columnist, Time magazine

"Where Are the C-C-Customers' Yachts? is a g-g-great read."--Charles Ellis, Managing Partner, Greenwich Associates

"A delightful classic and reminder of excesses past and how little things change."--Bob Farrell, Senior Vice President, Merrill Lynch

Where Are the Customers' Yachts?

"'Wall Street, ' reads the sinister old gag, 'is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other.'

This is striking, but incomplete. It omits the kindergarten in the middle, and that's what this book is about." --Fred Schwed, Jr.

Written by Fred Schwed, Jr., a professional trader who had the good sense to get out after losing a bundle in the crash of 1929, this hilarious portrait of Wall Street and its denizens rings as true today as it did when it was first published in 1940. Writing with a rare mixture of wry cynicism and bonhomie reminiscent of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, Schwed skewers everyone including himself in his vivid depictions of the bankers, brokers, traders, investors, analysts, and hapless customers.

Just listen to his take on the conservative banker:

The conservative banker is an impressive specimen. In times of stress, when everybody needs money, he strives to avoid lending, but usually makes an exception to the United States government. Likewise, in prosperous times, he is a mighty liberal lender--so liberal that years later unfriendly committees ask him what he thought he was thinking about, and he is unable to remember.

. . . or his witty assessment of technical analysis:

It is the popular feeling on Wall Street that chart readers are pretty occult professionals but that somehow most of them are broke. "If you have the bad taste to ask [one] how it happens that he is broke, he tells you quite ingenuously that he made the all too human error of not believing his own charts."

It's easy to see why, more than a half-century after it first appeared, Where Are the Customers' Yachts? continues to be hailed by market insiders as the funniest and most penetrating send-up of Wall Street ever penned.