Louis Engel

History of Financial Advice Collection. Louis Engel was responsible for the advertising strategies of Merril Lynch from the 1950s onwards and was key to the development of a form of advertising that drew centrally on the discourses of financial education. His essay-like advert for Merril Lynch, “What Everyone Ought to Know About this Stock and Bond Business,” first appeared in 1948 and continued to run for the next twenty years. How to Buy Stocks: A Guide to Making Money in the Market, published in 1953, was based on this advert and lasted twice as long. It stayed in print until the early ’90s and sold over 4 million copies, leading Engel to be named “the man who brought Wall Street to Main Street” by the New York Times. The tone of the book is in keeping with the postwar culture that insisted on the connection between the stock market and the general health of the American economy: it is based “on a very simple premise: that the stock market is going to go up” because the “market is a measure of the vigour of American business, and unless something drastic happens to America, business is going to go on growing.” Yet the book differs significantly from conventional financial investment guidebooks in that the art of stock picking, buying, and selling plays a smaller role than the mechanical practicalities of how to go about investing.… (más)