Free Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson

ordinary people could understand. And Jack Dreyfus' other proposition was that such people, exactly like wealthier investors, were anxious to make money with their money.
        Previously, the manager of mutual funds had tended to assume that it was their job to employ the clients' money to buy a mixture of good class shares and bonds, and leave it there regardless of peaks and troughs in the graph of stock exchange prices. Jack Dreyfus and his colleagues took the view that the investors wanted a mutual fund manager to be constantly looking for new growth shares, and to move their money into them.
        It was inevitable that a well managed fund, growing rapidly in a period of generally rising stock exchange prices would acquire some meteoric stocks. But it was an optical illusion, indeed a kind of wish fulfilment, that caused the spectators to imagine that it was the acquisition of meteoric
    stocks that caused the rise of the fund, rather than the other way round. The illusion, on the subsequent record, seems to have been imparted especially powerfully to two young men who sat, so to speak, at Jack Dreyfus' feet during those vibrant years in New York.
        One was Bernard Cornfeld who was growing rapidly dissatisfied with his role as a Basic Salesman at Investors Planning Corporation. And the other was Edward Morton Cowett, a distinguished graduate of the Harvard law school, employed in the Wall Street law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, counsel to the Dreyfus Fund. From the moment that he joined Stroock & Stroock, it was obvious that Ed Cowett was more interested in business than in the routine tasks of the law. He was always round at the Dreyfus office, trying to learn about mutual funds from Jack Dreyfus.
        In physique, and in manner, there has never been much in common between the creator and the assistant creator of IOS. Cowett, with his slim build, black hair slicked down, dark-rimmed spectacles and sharp, precise lawyer's manner, is the antithesis of Cornfeld, with his soft, slow voice, his tendency to plumpness, his slightly unkempt hair. Even today, when Cowett wears a Pierre Cardin suit, it is likely to be cut along much the same lines as any other business suit.
        Cowett was born on April 10, 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had a law practice. Edward was sent to Deerfield Academy, and then to Harvard.
        Having completed his undergraduate degree, Cowett hesitated for some time about postgraduate studies. He could not decide whether he was more attracted by the Harvard Business School or the Harvard Law School, but he was never in much doubt, it seems, that he would turn his legal training to business use eventually. 'Ed was brilliant academically,' recalls Lewis Kaplan, who was a couple of years behind him. 'He has a very challenging personality, and he didn't accept the orthodox answers.' In the event, Cowett graduated from the Law School within the top forty students, a graduation which made him automatically a member of the American elite. His educational record, and his upbringing were incomparably more advantageous than Cornfeld's: he could have taken his pick of politics, law, the State Department or business. It would have seemed most obvious for him to follow the path of his brilliant elder brother, Wilbur, already on the way to distinction as a partner of the investment bankers, Wertheim & Co.
        However, Cowett wanted to marry a fellow student one year behind him in the Law School, and so he needed to stay around Harvard for a year. He teamed up with an eminent Harvard professor, Louis Loss, and helped him in the preparation of a definitive work on Blue Sky Law, the picturesquely named body of regulations which are supposed to prevent American investors being deceived by unscrupulous company promoters. (The name is derived from a judge's remark that a certain security seemed to have 'about the same value as a patch of blue sky'.) Loss and