Adopting a ‘Shoe Shine Mentality’ to Avoid the Crypto Carnage
John Pierpont preferred to be called ‘Jack’ to differentiate himself from his father John Pierpont Sr., one of the richest men who ever lived. Jack had inherited his father’s wealth and was a shrewd businessman when it came to managing his family’s wealth during the roaring 1920s.
The story goes that Jack was getting his shoe’s shined by a young boy (the version I had heard almost 10 years ago mentioned Grand Central Station) on a fateful day during the Fall of 1929. Legend has it, that the (probably uneducated) shoe shining boy decided to share a secretive stock tip with his loyal customer. Alarm bells sounded in Jack’s head when he realized that he had heard the exact same stock tip earlier.
Jack ended up selling most of his stocks, enabling him to avoid one of the largest market crashed in history on 24th of October, 1929. The so-called “Black Tuesday” crash erased $14 billion (~$200 billion today) off the NYSE and ushered in a dozen years of global economic recession known today as the “Great Depression.”
Jack would go on to carefully steer the financial powerhouse his father founded thus building the family business into a banking dynasty that still persists today as a global bulge bracket banking behemoth known as JP Morgan.
BitCoin Bus Drivers and Other FinTech Experts
Today, the proverbial shone shiner is personified by many a retail investor and the recent crypto currency craze that is sweeping the globe.
What would have JP Morgan said about the Crypto Craze? Would he have been too quick to discredit it like his indirect descendent Jamie Dimon did? Which two reasons would he have picked from his famous quote when asked to describe cryptos:
“A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.”
Would he have been able to predict the BitCoin Bubble Burst?
My (value investing driven) opinion, he probably would have never even invested in the first place.
PS on the JP in the Shoe Shining Story
In another version of this famous Wall Street myth, the investor protagonist was actually another J.P. — notorious bootlegger/connected man and former US Ambassador to Her Majesty, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., father of another famous ‘Jack’, better known by the moniker — JFK.