Deja Vu, It's 1973 All Over Again

I was (am?) a product of the most expensive training program  ever staged by a wall street company, duPont Glore Forgan  aka duPont  Walston, but in Los Angeles. not New York City. It was to my knowledge Ross Perot's only losing effort, at least until just recently Read about the disastrous Park Central Hub fund here. Indeed,it has taken a Fibonacci 34 years for Ross Perot to suffer a spectacular loss again, and so this seems a fitting time to commemorate how the first one happened. The same hubris then led to the much larger financial failure by the guy who could not fail now. 

 In the interest of historic perspective, we will be re visiting the period from my recruitment in October 1972 to the bitter end, such as it was for me in August, 1974. That two years would be a new lifetime for me, and lots of others as the economy went into full tilt bear mode. Here is an excerpt of what you can expect. The point is to provide a window for historic perspective, how things were done then. But more than that this will be a story that shows while times changes, people and their moods do not. The same progression of Hope Fear Greed that dominated markets then does so now. We can use that period as a virtual road map of what to expect. My excerpt begins below, let me know what you think. 

We got half a day of financial training  and a half a day of sales training which tells you more than I can say  about how that business worked then and now.

Upon my return to Houston, the first phone call I was assigned was a fellow who wanted to cash in his mutual fund. I had no idea of course, how that was done, they had only trained us to sell funds and fill out applications, not redemptions. That was the late spring of 1973, about  16 months after the January 1972 high, gee why bother to teach anyone  how to sell eh?

I did of  course subsequently learn how to do that as it was a  frequent request, back then it took a signature guaranteed letter from  the share holder. A bank officer no less had to guarantee the signature. Here is another perspective. A commission investigating the cause of the crash of 1929 concluded that trades by telephone should not be allowed. It led to irrational short term decisions, better to require someone to come into the office and make a decision. The same sort of thinking held sway with the signature guaranteed letter. In the pre Fed Ex days it would take several days to end up at the fund anyway. Now contrast that procedure with today's online hit the key in and out trading frenzy. Gee, have we come full circle, first the telephone, now the internet, wrong decisions can be made in nano seconds. What an improvement....