Gerald Loeb was a founding partner of E.F. Hutton & Co., a renowned Wall Street

Wall Street

Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 trader, and the author of the books The Battle For Investment Survival and The Battle For Stock Market Profits. Loeb promoted a view of the market as too risky to hold stocks for the long term in contrast to well known value investors. He also created the Gerald Loeb Award

Gerald Loeb Award

The Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of...

, given annually for excellence in various cateogories of financial journalism.

Career and writing

Loeb began his career in 1921, working in the bond department of a securities firm in San Francisco. He moved to New York in 1924 after joining E. F. Hutton & Co.

E. F. Hutton & Co.

E. F. Hutton & Co. was an American stock brokerage firm founded in 1904 by Edward Francis Hutton, his brother Franklyn Laws Hutton, and later led by well known Wall Street trader Gerald M. Loeb. Under their leadership, Hutton became one of the most respected financial firms in the United States...

, and became vice-chairman of the board when the company incorporated in 1962.

Although he had largely avoided personal losses, the Wall Street Crash of 1929

Wall Street Crash of 1929

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 , also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout...

 greatly affected Loeb's investing style, making him skeptical of holding stocks for the long term. Loeb offered a contrarian investing

Contrarian investing

In finance, a contrarian is one who attempts to profit by investing in a manner that differs from the conventional wisdom, when the consensus opinion appears to be wrong....

 viewpoint, in books and columns in Barron's, The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

, and Investor Magazine. Forbes

Forbes

Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

magazine called Loeb "the most quoted man on Wall Street."

Loeb's first book, The Battle for Investment Survival(1935), sold over 200,000 copies during the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

. Loeb updated the book in 1957 and 1965, as it attained the status of a classic financial text. In 1971, Loeb published The Battle for Market Profits as a follow up to his original book where he depicted the market as a battlefield.