Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds By PaulCrosthwaite, PeterKnight, NickyMarsh, HelenPaul, and JamesTaylor, (eds.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. pp. 368. 15 figs. ISBN 9780226821009. Pbk $30
本书追溯1720年至2020年英美投资建议的演变，从印刷手册到网络论坛，分析其如何影响市场、金钱与社会，适合金融史学者阅读。
This co-authored book has the central aim of explaining how investment advice has come to occupy such a central role in today's society. This has been done over the long term, first in the UK and later in the United States, starting from 1720 and the South Sea Bubble and finishing in 2020 with the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and a boom in tech stocks. Originally concentrating on an archival search for printed investment manuals, the researchers’ remit aimed to fill the gap identified by Lendol Calder in 2012 when he observed that: ‘the print culture that helped people make sense of money – through financial advice offered in books, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements – awaits its historian’ (p. 3). However, this book goes even further in its ambition: to cover all forms of financial advice up to the present day, from South Sea Bubble pamphlets to retail investor websites such as Reddit, and explores how this advice has impacted markets, money, and society. The book is divided chronologically into six jointly authored chapters: 1720–1800, 1800–70, 1870–1910, 1910–50, 1950–90, and 1990–2020. The chapters are relatively long, for example, more than 50 pages each for chapters 3–5, allowing for a number of facets of particular relevance to the period in question to be elaborated upon. For example, the emphasis was on understanding the markets in the 1720–1800 period, epitomized in Mortimer's investment manual Every man his own broker: a guide to Exchange Alley, first published in 1761 and which aimed to demystify the much-traduced stockjobber. The second period, 1800–70, saw a dramatic increase in available data, not just share prices and their movements, but also trade data, such as railway statistics, which led to a plethora of railway magazines, one of which morphed into The Economist in 1843. This period also saw two self-help publications, Samuel Smiles’ Self-help published in 1859 – which showed how even the less wealthy could aspire to invest – and Emma Sophia Galton's 1863 A guide to the unprotected in every day matters relating to property and income, aimed at women and showing how they, too, could make profitable investments. Both of these texts continued to be published into the twentieth century and reflect a wider population of would-be investors encouraged in the UK by higher relative returns on foreign and colonial stocks, and in the United States, the development of new industries and large corporations. By the 1870–1910 period, there was a wide range of types of information and also of methods of distribution. The availability of shareholder lists, updated annually, allowed mail order marketing, distribution of prospectuses, bucket shop publications, and even door-to-door selling to attract investors. It was during this period that intermediaries made money from their investment advice as well as from insider trading. Later chapters cover themes such as the importance of women investors: the most frequent occupation on US share registers was ‘housewife’, a dominance that increased after married women were able to separate their investment income from that of their spouses. The run up to the Crash of 1928 and the aftermath in the 1930s and 1940s highlighted the role of investment advice in valuation approaches such as Chartism, reflecting a view that markets are inefficient, the importance of fundamentals in ‘value investing’ and of growth potential in ‘growth’ stocks. This variation in investment advice based on different data, varying growth projections, and different mathematical formulae, highlights the performativity of investment advice. By the 1960s, stock markets were considered efficient; more than 50 years later, that is no longer the case. More detailed data and new ways of analysing that data – the authors refer to robots – may have added to potential investment advice techniques, but the markets themselves are reduced in importance as investors prefer private equity to publicly listed securities. The heyday of publicly available investment advice is over. As the authors assert, financial advice is now a crucial element in a much larger picture of self-financialization. This book is well written and sustains the general themes over three centuries whilst having the space in each chapter to explore different topics. A minor caveat is that the structure within chapters is sometimes unclear. However, the book itself is a positive gold mine of information on investment advice, and also raises new research questions to be explored through such histories. Invested should be on every financial historian's bookshelf.