Money Game (original 1968; edição 1976)

History of Financial Advice Collection. Adam Smith was the financial journalist George Goodman’s pseudonym and the name suggests the wry concealed-insider status that typifies the book’s style. It was published in 1968 and is very clearly a book of its moment, informed by the excitement of the “go-go” years of the ’60s in which the small investor still played a role in the stock market but very prescient about the changes about to come, specifically the ending of the Bretton Woods agreement, the inflationary crisis of the ’70s and the speculative cultures of the ’80s. The book is important for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a detailed account of the psychology of the successful stock picker and knows that the market is about “image and reality and identity and anxiety and money […] the money which can preoccupy so much of our consciousness is an abstraction and a symbol. The game we play with it is an irrational one, and we play better with it when we realize that, even as we try to bring rationality to it.” Secondly, the book is also coded by the speculative genres of science fiction and the thriller, and can be read alongside the work of financial investors, such as Howard Ruff, Paul Erdman and Peter Tanous, who drew on the tropes of popular fiction to understand financial investment.

What is remarkable about this book is how ie speaks to the issues that led to the meltdown of 2007 and 2008. The missage is sim;ple.. Beware.Many of the Amazon nreviewers commented on how the book is a pleasure to read. It it. there is humor as well as advice.