Hetty Green – the Witch of Wall Street
3/13/2017
Every trader has a special itch for money. We don’t want to say that it’s bad. For people who work in finance having an earnest interest in money is a necessity. In this article, we would like to condemn misers, those whose ultimate goal in life is money accumulation, those whose gimmy is insatiable. Beware of becoming such a person, because extremely greedy people eventually come to a sticky end. To prove this, we’ve decided to tell you the story of the woman who is known as the world’s greatest miser of all times – the financier Hetty Green.
Ms. Green was a really talented savvy financier, one of the first women who turned a fortune on Wall Street. A smart manager of her own funds, she managed to become a major player at the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Streeters watched in astonished amazement as the rumpled, dowdy and dirty woman opened large positions in the chaotic totally unpredictable stock market, and made money almost every time. Playing in the stock market was Hetty’s self-indulgent preoccupation. Her real passion were mortgages. She also enjoyed lending money to bankers and brokerage houses. She started out with only $6 mln and turned this sum into the real fortune - $100 mln by the time of her death. Really impressive, eh? Yes, Hetty Green was a woman a century ahead of her time. I bet she would have become a great hedge fund or private equity manager. From all that has been said above, it would seem that we should praise this woman for her undertakings, admire her personality and wonder her ability to manage financial affairs. And we do give a proper respect to her talents. But we also feel obliged to point out at some seamy sides of her life.
Historians picture Ms. Green as wicked, greedy, extremely frugal woman with dowdy appearance, negligent to hygiene and to her surroundings. It is hard to describe the extreme of her miserliness in our such a tiny little article as ours. Stories circulate about Green’s stinginess. She was believed to wear the only black dress. She fought with everyone over money and how much she has to pay; she lined her son’s shoes and clothes with paper in wintertime. When she took her skirts to the laundry, she insisted on washing only the hems to save up more money. When her son, Ned, hurt his knee in a sledding accident, Green refused to get him a proper medical attention, because it was too costly. The boy grew up lame until in his teenage years, the leg became gangrenous and had to be amputated. When her beloved husband got bankrupt she refused to cover his debts. Green took her kids and moved to Brooklyn having decided to rent a flat in order not to pay higher taxes. Since then she went to her Wall Street office every morning at 7 am. in her ragged filthy dress wearing a black veil over her hat. Her contemporaries dubbed her a witch of Wall Street. She was watching every penny; her weekly expenses never exceeded $4 – 5; every morning she ate a dried tasteless oatmeal having heated it on a someone’s radiator in her Wall Street Office. The list of Green’s mean things can be extended. Here we’ve presented just a small number of them. But even with that, you got an idea. Our extreme greediness, avarice may make us insane, wicked people despised by the society and her nearest.
The moral of this story is following: be moderate in your wishes to earn more (you’re not Hetty Green, who was so lucky that didn’t suffer great financial losses; nowadays, traders are more exposed to the risk of losing all their money), trade wisely and don’t make the money accumulation the only goal of your life.
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