William Peter Hamilton (1867–1929)

Probably the essential book in explicating the Dow Theory, which curiously enough, was never explicated by its author in one spot, but was the result of numerous editorials in the Wall Street Journal over the course of a number of years. The author, who himself was a Wall Street Journal editorialist, lays it out. He's repetitive in spots, and part of the book veers off into going after government interference in business; furthermore, pockets of the book are of course out of date with the creation of the SEC, which has addressed some of the issues of manipulation and information noted in the book. Still, a definite financial curio.… (más)

History of Financial Advice Collection. Crucial to Dow Theory as it was popularized in the 1920s was the idea that a scientific approach to the stock market entailed viewing it as a “barometer” of wider economic conditions. This idea was the key concern of William Peter Hamilton, a protégé of Dow’s, who edited the Wall Street Journal from 1908 until his death in 1929. Hamilton’s The Stock Market Barometer anticipated fully-fledged academic theories of the “efficient market” by several decades in asserting that “the price movement represents the aggregate knowledge of Wall Street and, above all, its aggregate knowledge of coming events.” For Hamilton, the stock market was a “barometer” (rather than a mere “recorder”) because, in discounting “everything everybody knows, hopes, believes, anticipates,” it did not represent “what the condition of business is to-day,” but “what that condition will be months ahead”—a “function of prediction” performed with “almost uncanny accuracy.”… (más)