Ladies' Day

In the chastely modern arena of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, bulls & bears looked up from their trading last week to find 50 eager women giving them the once-over. The first women visitors ever to be permitted on the floor of the exchange, they were the first of ten tourist parties, all anxious to learn how to be good investors.

The tour was part of an investment course for women thought up by Ferdinand C. Smith, resident partner of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, biggest U.S. brokerage house. "Ferd" Smith's office staff pooh-poohed the idea at first, but Smith argued that women, besides doing most of the spending in the U.S., have also become important owners of U.S. business. In many big corporations (U.S. Steel, General Motors, A.T. & T., etc.) women stockholders outnumber men. And sooner or later, most women have to take on the job of managing their husbands' estates. Yet few women are trained in money management, or know anything about interpreting balance sheets.

For his first session, Smith hired a hall that would seat 50, but when applicants besieged him with calls, he hastily switched to the 550-seat Women's City Club auditorium. The women all but broke down the doors; 300 without tickets were turned away. Few of the 583 registrants missed a session; bankers and corporation heads began to clamor to get on the list of guest lecturers. Last week Smith had 1,100 women on the waiting list for his second course, to start in a few weeks.

The idea was catching on elsewhere. Last week in the ladies' lounge of the Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, 70 women started a ten-week lecture course in investment sponsored by New York University. All had signed up (at $35 each) to hear Finance Professor Guy Downs Plunkett lecture on such topics as "Can I Profit from the Financial Pages of the Newspapers?" The professor thought they could.

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