Description

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Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals.
 
Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening.
 
Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.
 

About the Author

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Paul Crosthwaite is professor of English at the University of Edinburgh. 

Peter Knight is professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester. 

Nicky Marsh is professor of English at Southampton University. 

Helen Paul is a lecturer in economics and economic history at Southampton University.

James Taylor is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Lancaster and the author of Creating Capitalism.

Praise For…

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“I’m reading the wonderful Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds, a magnificent effort from five dedicated academics covering a full 300 years of printed investment advice. That adds up to an awful lot of books. But skim the contents of a few and you will find that under different titles and guises, they mostly give the same rather good advice—advice we are as well to follow today as we were in the eighteenth century.”
— Bloomberg

"A magnificent effort from five dedicated academics covering a full 300 years of printed investment advice."
— The Washington Post

“Invested is an engrossing survey . . . . This is a sourcebook I’ll return to frequently for my own work. Fascinating and highly recommended.”
— The Patient Investor

“This book is well written and sustains the general themes over three centuries whilst having the space in each chapter to explore different topics. . . . The book itself is a positive gold mine of information on investment advice, and also raises new research questions to be explored through such histories. Invested should be on every financial historian’s bookshelf.”
— Economic History Review

"Recommended."
— Choice

"[An] ambitious and entertaining book on the history of stock market advice in the UK and US from 1720 to today. . . . Invested shows that the lure of stock market advice is persistent."
— Business History

“Invested is a comprehensive and very well-informed account of the development of financial advice literature from its first appearance in 1761 to the present day, including a very useful afterword on the effect of the current pandemic on the genre. This excellent book provides a vast and original understanding of how financial advice has grown in relation to both the evolution of the stock market and the financialization of everyday life.”
 
— Anne Murphy, University of Portsmouth