Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS
The brokers Stovall worked with, of course, made much more than
minimum wage. Still, their compensation was not nearly as stratospheric
as those positions command today. “There were no investment
analysts or position traders, and underwriting was small change and
infrequent,” Stovall notes. “There were two kinds of people who made
the most money. First were the brokers with large family or individual
trading accounts. Second were those brokers whose daddies could
direct bank business their way. They were known as ‘lounge lizards,’
and often didn’t even come into work because they knew daddy would
automatically route trades to them. These kinds of directed business
transactions are thankfully now a thing of the past.”
OFF TO COLLEGE…AND WAR
After graduating from Seton Hall Prep in 1943, Stovall went to the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business with dreams
of becoming a financial analyst. It was a great time for button-bright
lads such as Stovall to get into college, since women often didn’t go
for specialized training and most men of his generation were being
drafted to duty in World War II. He applied to and was accepted by
Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and Penn, a feat he admits is much more
difficult to accomplish now. “My father really didn’t want to me go
to college,” Stovall reveals. “He didn’t think it was necessary, because
nobody in his family had ever been. He did get a bookkeeping certificate
from a mail-order educational program called the International
School of Accountancy. He figured I could just follow in his footsteps
and become a bookkeeper as well. His point of view was that if I just
learned how to keep books and manage people I would do all right.
But my mother was more aggressive. Her half-brother was a medical
doctor in Louisville. The teachers and headmasters at Seton Prep also
encouraged me to further my education. So I did. My father said if I
were going to enroll in college, I better go to the Wharton School to
learn business, as had Richard Reynolds, Jr., and his business partner
Charles Babcock (husband of Mary Reynolds, Richard’s sister). His
point was that Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown were simply extensions
of the classical education I got at the prep school. I guess this reasoning
was philosophically appropriate in my case.”
Wharton was the first business school organized anywhere in the
world. It was financed in the mid-1850s by iron and steel industry
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