2026-04-22
38 分钟I want to talk about Winston Churchill.
What kind of investor was he?
It really kind of.
Makes your skin crawl some of the things that he got up to along the way.
He was given this advance that was worth close to over £7 million in inflation-adjusted or close
to £80 million in GDP-adjusted terms.
He lost it all.
Oh, wow.
He lost it all in the crash in the stock market?
No, no, just trading.
There were these nine trading days ending the 18th of October where he really went into overdrive.
He traded $620,000 worth of stock. £80 million worth adjusted for contemporary exchange rates.
And that trading activity just saw him completely wiped out.
And welcome to the story of money, the brand new podcast from the Financial Times where we rummage through the past
to make sense of the financial present and sometimes the future too.
Yep, because if there's one thing that finance has taught us, it's that people keep making the same silly mistakes.
And these days we might use Bloomberg terminals, spreadsheets and special purpose vehicles.
But you can get into just as much hilarious trouble with a simple abacus.
I'm Gillian Tett, an anthropologist turned FT columnist.
And that means that I love to look at all the hidden rituals and occasional historical absurdities of the financial world