Word: stocke
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wall Streeter to predict the Great Crash of 1929. Indeed, in the months leading up to the Crash, Merrill pleaded (to no avail) with President Calvin Coolidge to speak out against speculation. By February 1929, Merrill was so sure the end was near that he liquidated his firm's stock portfolio, an act that made him famous in October, when the Crash finally came...
Merrill, you see, was the first person to openly advocate that the stock market should not just be a plaything for Wall Street insiders but should also be an avenue for the broad mass of Americans. Decades before founding Merrill Lynch, he coined the phrase "Bringing Wall Street to Main Street." For the last 17 years of his life, that's what he tried to achieve with his new firm, which became a laboratory for his grand experiment. Today when we conjure up the names of the great American financiers, we tend to think of people like J.P. Morgan...
...retrospect, Merrill Lynch was really Charlie Merrill's bully pulpit, the platform from which he could preach the virtues of the stock market and show the country that the small investor could get a fair shake on Wall Street. "Demystification had been the key to [my father's] great success," James Merrill later wrote in his memoir. "No more mumbo-jumbo from Harvard men in paneled rooms; let the stock market's workings henceforth be intelligible even to the small investor." To that end, the firm published an endless stream of reports, magazines, pamphlets--11 million pieces in 1955 alone...
...bottom Merrill's heirs. Their modern investing mantra is the same basic message he preached so many years ago-- that people should invest for the long haul; that they should have a clear understanding of the companies they are buying; that despite the hair-raising ups and downs, stocks have historically outperformed every other form of investment. Today the stock market no longer belongs to insiders. It belongs to all of us. We all now partake in its gains, just as we share in its losses--and who among us would argue that it should be any other way? Good...
Building modest homes made Levitt rich. In 1968, after his company had built more than 140,000 houses around the world, Levitt & Sons was sold to ITT Corp. for $92 million in stock, most of which went to him. That fortune bought, among other things, a 237-ft. yacht, La Belle Simone, named for his third wife, and a 30-room mansion in Mill Neck, N.Y. But the deal barred him from the domestic construction business for 10 years. Within four years, the ITT stock, which he had been using as collateral to build subdivisions in places like Iran, Venezuela...