Not nearly as maligned as lawyers, practitioners of the financial arts still have long suffered a dubious reputation in our culture.
For instance, consider that Mark Twain (Samuel Clements), the epic American writer of legendary proportion, had some rather negative, though certainly amusing, observations concerning money, the stock market and stockbrokers.
In “Mark Twain’s Notes,” on the subject of money, he wrote: “Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite—but they all worship money.”
On the nature of the stock market, in “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar,” Twain penned: “October: this is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.”
In fact, Wikipedia now documents the “Mark Twain Effect” as the phenomenon of stock returns in October being lower than in other months. The ’29, ’87, and ’08 crashes occurred in the month of October. Twain has hit the big time!
From that same work, Twain penned the equally cynical line: “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.”
Then, in his work “Daniel in the Lion’s Den-And Out Again All Right,” published in “The California,” November 5, 1864, Twain took several clever swipes at stockbrokers: “I consider that a broker goes according to the instincts that are in him, and means no harm, and fulfills his mission according to his lights, and has a right to live, and be happy in a general way, and be protected by the law to some extent, just as a better man. I consider that brokers come into the world with souls-I am satisfied they do; and if they wear them out in the course of a long career of stock-jobbing, have they not a right to come in at the eleventh hour and get themselves half-soled, like old boots, and be saved at last?”