Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal writes about the paper’s former personal finance columnist, Jonathan Clements, who died last Sunday at the age of 62.
Zweig writes, “When Jonathan started writing for the Journal, those claims weren’t just common. They were treated as gospel, chanted into the ears of every investor by the entire financial industry.
“Jonathan was having none of it. When a company publicized a ‘study’ claiming that individual investors underperformed the stock market by a pathetic 10 percentage points annually over two decades, brokers and financial advisers touted the results ad nauseam. To them, it was proof that investors are dolts who desperately need to pay for advice. Jonathan ripped the study to shreds, concluding that ‘fund shareholders—instead of looking like clods—appear to be fairly savvy.’
“He also mocked Wall Street’s jargon and empty verbiage.
“What does ‘We’re cautiously optimistic’ mean? It means ‘We can’t figure out what’s going on,’ Jonathan wrote.
“What about ‘The stock market was down on technical factors’? That, he explained, means ‘We have no idea why shares fell.'”
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