Fuld, Stock Market Trivia

Do you live and breathe the financial markets? Are you a trivia nut? Do you just want to have an hour or so of fun? If so, I can recommend Stock Market Trivia (2013) by Fred Fuld III. The author sent me a copy, and I had an enjoyable time flipping through it. “Flipping through” because, alas, my brain was already cluttered with a lot of market trivia. And with many of the weird words of Wall Street, defined in the second part of the book.

Here are a couple of examples of what you can find in this book. The smallest stock exchange in the world, measured by the number of stocks traded, is the Douala Stock Exchange in Cameroon, with only three listings at the moment.

One pound equals $490. No, of course, this is not an exchange rate. Rather, if you stack 490 dollar bills on a scale, they will weigh one pound.

From the two pages of “funny mergers”: “If the following companies were to merge: Caterpillar, Gottschalks, Uranium Energy, Tongjitang Chinese Medicines, you would end up with Cat Got Ur Tong.”

And can you believe that any company would have the ticker symbol SCAM? It is usually published as SCAM.L since it trades on the London Stock Exchange and is a highly regarded British mutual fund.