Fred Schwed's satirical masterpiece, first published in 1940 and never out of print, takes its title from an old joke: a visitor to New York's financial district is shown the brokers' and bankers' gleaming yachts and asks where the customers' yachts are. The answer, of course, is that there aren't any — and from this punchline Schwed proceeds to develop the most entertaining and penetrating critique of Wall Street ever written. Working as a professional trader during the 1920s boom and subsequent crash, Schwed writes from genuine insider experience about the structural conflicts of interest, the systematic extraction of value from clients through commissions and bad advice, the pretension to expertise that conceals profound uncertainty about market outcomes, and the essential absurdity of an industry that makes its living by charging customers for a service whose value it cannot demonstrate. What makes the book a masterpiece rather than merely a polemic is Schwed's genuine wit and his evident affection for many of the people he is skewering — he portrays Wall Street professionals not as villains but as human beings trapped in an institutional culture that makes rational and ethical behavior almost impossible. Written more than eighty years ago, the book's observations about speculative bubbles, analyst conflicts of interest, the inability of professional managers to beat the market consistently, and the incentive structures that prioritize fee generation over client outcomes are so precisely applicable to contemporary finance that readers regularly marvel at how little has changed.