Charles Duguid

History of Financial Advice Collection. By the early twentieth century it was becoming common for financial journalists to supplement their daily or weekly columns with book-length guides to the market, and Charles Duguid, City editor at the Westminster Gazette, produced this short but influential manual in 1901. Broken up into short, easily-digestible chapters, it explains the aims, scope, and contents of the City column, giving novice investors practical advice in not only jargon and terminology, but also, crucially, how to read between the lines. Thus, Duguid explains that a notice of a prospectus in the City article was not a recommendation to subscribe for its shares, and that most reports of company meetings appearing in the financial press were paid for by the companies involved. He also explains the characteristics of what he dubs “the new financial journalism,” which, rather than merely reporting price movements with useful comment, sought to provide “a money article with a heart, written humanely for human beings.” Duguid subsequently became one of the leading exponents of the new financial journalism, enjoying a long tenure at the Daily Mail under Lord Northcliffe. How to Read the Money Article was perhaps his most enduring legacy, outliving its author and remaining in print into the 1930s.… (altro)

History of Financial Advice Collection. Charles Duguid, a member of the newly formed Institute of Journalists, was a key figure in the “new financial journalism” of the late nineteenth century, which sought to enliven the press’s coverage of the markets. Having built a profile first at the Pall Mall Gazette, then at the Westminster Gazette, he was approached to write a history for the Stock Exchange Souvenir, a limited circulation commemorative volume, from which this book was adapted. Arranged chronologically, the chapters give a detailed and well-researched history of the securities market from the late seventeenth century to the start of the twentieth. More rigorous and analytical than John Francis’s history, now over fifty years old, it nevertheless sought to make the story of the rise of the Stock Exchange readable and accessible to general readers. Though not ignoring scandalous episodes, it presents a celebratory view of the Stock Exchange (“the mart of the world, the nerve-centre of the politics and finances of its nations”), and also seeks to humanize what was still a remote institution, barred to the general public and the object of much suspicion.… (altro)