The Davis Dynasty: Fifty Years of Successful Investing on Wall Street »

JOHN ROTHCHILD wrote, with Peter Lynch, the blockbusters One Up on Wall Street, Beating the Street, and Learn to Earn. Rothchild is the sole author of The Bear Book, A Fool and His Money, and Going for Broke. A former editor of the Washington Monthly and Fortune magazine, Rothchild has written for Harper's, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and other magazines. He has appeared on the Today show, the Nightly Business Report, and CNBC.

The story of the Davis dynasty is, in many ways, the story of Wall Street over the last half century. John Rothchild’s sweeping saga chronicles the changing face of Wall Street alongside the financial escapades of one of America’s most successful, yet unheralded investing families.
Three generations of the Davis family portfolio–patriarch Shelby Cullom Davis, son Shelby, and grandsons Chris and Andrew–take you through the canyons of Wall Street as they consistently beat the market with a growth-at-a-reasonable price philosophy and a passion for investing.
Born into a middle-class family in Peoria, Illinois, Shelby Cullom Davis was more interested in history than finance. That all changed in 1947 when, at age thirty-eight, he left his job as a New York State Insurance Department bureaucrat and plunged into investing using $50,000 of his wife’s money. In the late 1940s, as the Dow reeled at 180 and Wall Street ignored insurance stocks, Davis went with what he knew best and built a dynasty from a plain-vanilla portfolio of insurance stocks.
With proven strategies and a frugal spending philosophy, Davis amassed a fortune from the postwar bull market of the 1950s through the glorious market of the 1980s. He passed his experience on to future generations but left nearly $900 million in trust for conservative causes, forcing his family to continue the dynasty on their own merits.
Son Shelby Davis took on Wall Street during the go-go market of the 1960s. He started a small investment firm and took control of the fledgling New York Venture Fund, which beat the market twenty-two of the twenty-eight years he operated it. Navigating theinflationary market of the 1970s was tricky, but Shelby emerged unscathed. Grandsons Andrew and Chris steered the Davis dynasty through the 1990s and continue into a new century as they use the refined financial strategies of the Davis family to challenge Wall Street and manage Davis Convertible and Real Estate Funds.
Although markets may change, the tradition of financial expertise does not. The Davis dynasty, built on the belief of "compounding machines"–companies that could multiply your investment–and the idea that long-term investing lasts a lifetime, has passed through two lengthy bull markets, two savage and seven mild bear markets, one crash, and twenty-five corrections.
With The Davis Dynasty, John Rothchild presents the Davis family, their investment philosophy, and Wall Street within a historical and literary narrative that is informative, entertaining, and engaging. Take a once-in-a-lifetime journey through Wall Street with one of the most successful investing families in America and watch how a dynasty was built.

Publishers Weekly

In 1975, Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat up in front of the Investors' Diversified Services building the tallest in Minneapolis then and today and made television history. Founded by a Minneapolis lawyer, John Elliott Tappan, as Investors' Syndicate in 1894, the company grew to a network of almost 7,000 independent financial salespeople before being acquired by American Express in 1984. Tappan's company now does business as American Express Financial Advisers. This book tells the IDS story in a frankly worshipful way (coauthor Peters is one of Tappan's great-granddaughters). Tappan applied the smalltown and rural door-to-door sales techniques of life insurance to agricultural banking and eventually branched out into other investment products, including insurance. With products tailored to the needs of small Midwestern investors and borrowers, the company competed successfully with larger and less personal East Coast institutions. Unlike many other investment companies, IDS survived the Depression with reputation and finances intact. It grew swiftly during World War II as its salespeople spread throughout the armed services and provided a home for savings in those cash-rich, goods-poor days. As these former servicemen retired in the 1980s, IDS reinvented itself first as a mutual fund company, then as a financial planning company. The authors credit Tappan with extraordinary vision and economic sophistication, but there is little hard evidence that he was more than a shrewd and persistent financial salesperson with an important but not defining role in the growth of IDS. (Sept.) Forecast: This book may do well among American Express employees, especially if there is a corporate buy; otherswill probably skip it. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.