Edgar Smith

Author of the influential 1924 book Common Stocks as Long Term Investments which promoted the 1920 stock market boom, Edgar Lawrence Smith is a known economist and investment manager that advanced the idea of stocks excelling bonds on the long-term yield. He worked in banking and other financial endeavors in the years after college, then signed on in 1922 as an adviser to the brokerage firm Low, Dixon & Company. The book’s success enabled Smith to launch a mutual fund firm, Investment Managers Company. It also garnered him an invitation from the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had favorably reviewed the book in The Nation and Atheneum, to join the Royal Economic Society.