Wall Street: To the Last Drop

Wall Street's bulls like to joke that "no Fifth Avenue mansions have been built by bears." The bulls are wrong. Though most investment profits have indeed been made on upswing, Bernard Baruch bagged one of his first fortunes by bearishly selling short in Amalgamated Copper in 1901, and Joseph P. Kennedy earned more than $1,000,000 by short-selling in 1929-30. Among the other famous bears who got into the honey in the Depression were Tom Bragg and "Sell 'em Ben" Smith. One day Smith picked up a phone to make a call, but Bragg bellowed: "Wait a minute—I'm short of...