The Roaring Twenties

Retail investing was pushed, not pulled, particularly at the outset. While Russians were being trained in the 1920s to reject the bourgeois idea of money and savings, Americans were introduced to a sophisticated new world of capital markets by brokers and bankers who saw retail investing as a new profitable area of marketing.

The zeitgeist of market speculation had finally crossed the Atlantic.... In contrast to the popular pre-War notion of a Wall Street dominated by insiders like Daniel Drew, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J P Morgan, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the 1920s emphasised fairness. In the 'New Era' of stock market investing, the small investor was no longer a victim of market manipulation by insiders - the NYSE promoted itself as the seal of approval for a square investment deal.

If common stocks once were synonymous with speculation and back-room trickery, they were now transformed, via a period of patriotic fervour and sudden familiarity with brokers and investment portfolios, into a new 'appliance' in the American household....


Stocks captivated the US imagination in the 1920s in a different manner from the British investor movement of the Victorian era. Most of Henry Lowenfeld's studies of global diversification in London used bonds to illustrate a sound investment policy.... But in America, tastes turned sharply toward equities. Americans still bought bonds, but people grew increasingly wary of them.

From "Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilisation Possible"