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Source: Incongruities 65

all over the United States. And it owes its success and growth to having
exploited an incongruity.
The large financial institutions, the Merrill Lynches and Dean
Witters and E. F. Huttons, assume that their customers have the same
values they have. To them it is obvious, if not axiomatic, that people
invest in order to get rich. This is, after all, what motivates the mem-
bers of the New York Stock Exchange, and determines what they con-
sider “success.” However, this assumption holds true only for a part
of the investing public, and surely not even for the majority. They are
not “financial people.” They know that in order to “get rich” by
investing, one has to work full time at managing money and be pret-
ty knowledgeable about it. The local professional men, the local small
businessmen, the local substantial farmers, however, have neither
such time nor such knowledge; they are much too busy earning their
money to have time to manage it.
This is the incongruity which the Midwestern securities firm
exploits. Outwardly, it looks just like any other securities firm. It is
a member of the New York Stock Exchange. But only a very small
portion of its business, around one-eighth, is Stock Exchange busi-
ness. It stays away from the items the big trading houses on Wall
Street push the hardest: options, commodity futures, and so on,
appealing instead to what it calls “the intelligent investor.” It does
not promise—and this is a genuine innovation among American
financial service institutions—that its customers will make a fortune.
It does not even want customers who trade. It wants customers who
earn more money than they spend, which is typical for the success-
ful professional, the substantial farmer, or the small-town business-
man, less because their incomes are high than because their spend-
ing habits are modest. And then it appeals to their psychological
need to protect their money. What this firm sells is a chance to main-
tain one’s savings—through investment in bonds and stocks, to be
sure, but also in deferred annuities, tax-sheltered partnerships, real
estate trust, and so on. The “product” the firm delivers is a different
one and one that no Wall Street house has ever sold before: peace of
mind. And this is what really represents “value” for the “intelligent
investor.”
The big Wall Street houses cannot even imagine that such customers
exist since they defy everything the houses believe in and hold true.
This successful firm has now been widely publicized. It is on every list
of large and growing Stock Exchange firms. Yet the senior people in the