The Forecaster

The short, wiry figure of Frederick N. Goldsmith, 83, was as much a part of Wall Street as the pigeons on the Stock Exchange fac,ade. For 50 years it had known his rumpled Panama hats, battered briefcase and friendly "Hi!" A successful man, he had made as much as $39,000 a year writing his market forecasts. Some 200 steady subscribers paid him up to $25 a month for his predictions.

Then Goldsmith came under the critical eye of New York State Attorney General Nathaniel Goldstein. In advertisements of his service, he had claimed to have "inside" information. The investigators, suspecting fraud, called in Goldsmith. Where did he get his "inside" information? What Goldsmith told them, reluctantly, made their eyes pop.

Good Medium. Back in 1916, he said, a spiritualist had put him in touch with the ghost of James R. Keene, the famed Wall Street plunger. Keene had tipped him off that the "insiders" rigged the market every day, using a code that in recent years had appeared in the Bringing Up Father comic strip. Said Goldsmith: "It took me an awfully long time to break the code, but once I did, it was simple to predict the market with 90 to 95% accuracy."

To illustrate, Goldsmith took a Maggie & Jiggs strip of last May. The first frame showed Jiggs with his right hand in his pocket. Explained Analyst Goldsmith: "A signal to buy."* Two rings of smoke were coming from Jiggs's cigar ("The market will go up in the second hour of trading"). In the second frame, Maggie is saying: "I don't see why you can't get your name in the paper, too" ("Buy International Paper"). In the last frame, Jiggs's cigar smoke is still rising, indicating a steady market at the close.

Maggie & Jiggs, said Goldsmith, had called the turn on a stock last June 15 when Jiggs said: "The intermissions are the only good things about this show." "Obviously," said Goldsmith, "that meant that Mission Oil was the only good buy." He so advised his customers, and two days later Mission Oil hit a new high. (Goldsmith also discovered tips in the Wall Street Journal's "Pepper and Salt" joke column.)

Medium Good. Was this system reliable? Goldsmith retorted: "I have seen it work time after time." Besides, he added with solemnity, only recently the late J. P. Morgan had passed on word, through a medium, that Goldsmith was doing fine. Goldsmith's customers thought so, too. When the investigators wrote to some of his clients, they had nothing but praise. "Uncanny predictions," wrote a New York Stock Exchange member. "Sound understanding," echoed a Boston broker. "There is nothing that touches it," said a Wall Street securities dealer.

What amazed investigators--and might well appall Wall Street--was that Goldsmith's comic-strip forecasts had been right as often as many solemn market guides that rely on the "science" of charts, trend lines, explosion points, recoils, double tops and double bottoms. Nevertheless, the Attorney General last week got an injunction stopping Goldsmith's forecasts--not because they came from comic strips but because he had not said so.

*Said amazed George McManus, aging (64) cartoonist father of Maggie & Jiggs: "What would I be doing with cartoons if I were so hot on the stock market?"

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