The Trillionaire Next Door

Andy Borowitz

When you get tired of reading through dreary stock market books, grab this one and head off to the park. Relax for an hour or so as humorist Andy Borowitz makes light of even the most serious of Wall Street’s protestations as he educates you to his “The Ten Principles of Day Trading.” Drum roll, please.

Of course, stocks have always been a favorite target of humorists. Mark Twain: “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." Or try Will Rogers: “Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.”  The strange thing about humor is that there’s usually a lot of truth underneath.

Now we get Borowitz, the satirist, in his best form to expose The Most Recent Emperor’s New Clothes. From the computer cowboys riding their monitors from dawn to dusk (and into the night), to the official corporate and governmental pronouncements, to the analysts’ hype, to the media’s cheerleading, to our own self-delusions, everything and everyone comes in for a good drubbing. Reminds me of taking what we thought we were supposed to be serious about during the mania and hanging it out on the line for sport. Makes us look silly. And looking back at it with 5 years hindsight, you really wouldn’t want to see that home movie showing how you explained to the children that you were getting rich in the great boom either. The only sign of the times Borowitz didn’t pulverize was the major TV network news programs profiling movie stars and taxicab drivers as prescient stock pickers. That just had to be the final signal that a top was near, and ranks right up there with the bellhops of 1929. A good, quick read, and a lot of fun too. Refer back to it next time things get too good to be true.