In every industry, there are people to whom modern-day legacies can be traced. If the industry is prominent enough, these are the people whose names have become synonymous with innovation, risk-taking, success and failure, scandal, norms and standards.

The investment industry is no exception, and Ken Fisher’s update of his 1993 book, 100 Minds That Made the Market, is an admirable effort to chronicle the market’s evolution.

There are a few points to note about this book. First, Fisher acknowledges that his list of 100 influential investment personalities may be different from yours; however, there is likely to be significant similarities simply because of the pre-eminent reputations most of Fisher’s subjects have earned. Second, all the people profiled are dead. Fisher has intentionally excluded our industry’s living legends because he feels there is enough public information about them available every day. His objective is to provide historical insight.

Finally, the proxy he uses for the market’s evolution is Wall Street. So, most of the characters are American and the “plot,” so to speak, is based on almost two centuries of pioneering, perspiration and survival of the fittest. Today, that arena is arguably the incorporation of all that is good and bad with the investment business.

100 Minds is divided into 11 chapters, each describing Wall Street through brief vignettes of one to three pages of the individuals who started, financed, innovated, assimilated, systematized, scandalized and reformed it — along with a few others. Here a few examples of the categories Fisher has coined, as chapter titles, to organize his 100:

> The Dinosaurs. In the world of finance, names such as Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rothschild represent the early leviathans. Some Vanderbilts, for example, built their fortunes using tactics that are illegal today, including bribery, stock-watering and cornering, while others, particularly the Rothschilds, were able to follow a gentler path with more enduring results. On the “good guy” side, Junius Morgan (father of J.P.), was the first to make the Morgan name stand for integrity, trust and competence.

> Journalists And Authors. It is hard to comprehend in our Internet-centric world a time when there was no way to check stock prices instantaneously. In the late 1890s, Charles Dow and his pal, Edward Jones, created the Wall Street Journal, which spawned myriad publications — including B.C. Forbes’ Forbes magazine and Clarence Barron’s Barron’s Financial Weekly — to interpret, analyse, report on and promote the stock market. Dow and Jones were also, of course, the innovators of the Dow Jones industrial average, today’s most widely watched market barometer.

> Investment Bankers And Bro-kers. The pioneers in this category include the likes of J.P. Morgan, who dominated U.S. finance in a way no one has done since by creating giant enterprises that enabled the U.S. to become the most powerful industrialized nation in the world. Charles Merrill, having earned a fortune as an investment banker, became passionate about bringing “Wall Street to Main Street” and, along with his bond-salesman partner, Edmund Lynch, built the world’s largest brokerage firm through client education and innovative strategies for the average investor.

> Innovators. As Wall Street operations and activities expanded and evolved, it became inevitable that key players would see opportunity in innovation — often, unfortunately, benefiting their own ambitions. Yet many of their creative inventions persist today, including those initiated by Georges Doriot (first venture-capital company); Thomas Ryan (first holding company); Russell Sage (put and call options); Roger Babson (market statistics); T. Rowe Price (growth investing); Floyd Odlum (corporate raiding) and Joseph Kennedy (first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission).

> Others. Even crooks and scandals can be good for an enterprise because they often provide lessons that prompt change and reform. In that regard, no name is more associated with investment shams than Charles Ponzi, whose zero-sum pyramid scheme rocked the industry in the early 1900s.

Another is Walter Tellier, who, while not the inventor of “boiler rooms,” made great use of them promoting “miracle” penny stocks. On the other side of the ledger, we have the technicians, good and bad, including R.N. Elliott of the Wave Principle fame and economist John Maynard Keynes.

100 Minds is an interesting read. And its short vignette-like structure makes it easy to pick up for a few minutes at a time. IE