The game and the man behind Adam Smith
Chapter 1 of 12 · 10 min
In 1968, in the middle of the go-go era's peak years, a financial journalist publishing under the pseudonym Adam Smith brings out a book that becomes number one on the bestseller lists and stays there for over a year. The man is called George Goodman and the book is called The Money Game. The thesis is simple and explosive: the stock exchange is a game — played with money, but about identity.
George J. W. Goodman — Rhodes scholar, essayist and one of the founders behind the magazine Institutional Investor — chose the pseudonym 'Adam Smith' as a nod to the economist behind The Wealth of Nations. The joke was entirely serious: the book would describe the market with the same systematic rigor as 1776, but with the reporter's eye and the satirist's pen.
The Money Game (1968) became an enormous success: number one on the New York Times bestseller list, translated into a long list of languages, read by fund managers and beginners alike. Goodman later wrote the follow-up Supermoney (1972), but The Money Game remained his signature — the classic of financial journalism about the game and the players.
The book's thesis. Goodman does not open with balance sheets but with a question of the type: what are you playing for? The answer 'the money' is not accepted — 'money is just a way of keeping score', money is only the way of counting points. The game is played for real stakes: identity, status, excitement and the right to have been right.
That is why the title reads The Money Game — the game about money — and that is why Goodman can laugh at his characters without despising them. He draws the market's men (it was almost only men in 1968) with a warmth and irony that make Poor Grenville, Scarsdale Fats and Charley live on as archetypes more than half a century later.
The 1968 context. The book was written at the top of the post-war era's first great witch's cauldron: the go-go funds chased momentum, the conglomerates built empires through acquisitions, and 'performance' — the quarterly league table of returns — had become the industry's new god. Dow Jones nudged the 1 000 level in December 1968; within eighteen months the go-go era had collapsed and the book appeared in retrospect as a piercing description of a system about to crash.
Goodman wrote no textbook in value investing — he wrote a reportage book from inside the gambling den, with humor as both mirror and weapon. That is precisely why it endures: the cycles change technology but keep their players.
For AK1A, The Money Game is the founding charter of the psychology track. The point is logical: if the market were an arithmetic problem, no model would be needed — a calculator would suffice. That a checklist like AKM1 with its twenty V variables is needed at all is Goodman's point in practice: players who do not know what they are playing for lose to those who do.
Note already now that every AKM1 variable, from V01 revenue growth to V20 share buyback, is an attempt to move attention from the ego to the company — from the game to the operation. That is the whole course's common thread.