Companies in the Financial Industry - Essay Example

Other companies and their strategies will also be examined in an attempt to discover if they will reach the pinnacle, for which they are aimed, or if they will fail in their efforts to knock the ‘king off his mountain’.In order to reach the top in the financial services industry, and, an even more difficult task; to stay there, a certain amount of attitude can be a good thing, and some experts may even say it is more than likely a necessary thing. Some of the companies discussed herein have that ‘attitude’ and some of them don’t.

Initially, the focus of this paper was to be on a number of the oldest and most well known New York Stock Exchange firms such as Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Kidder Peabody, JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan and Prudential. It soon became clear that such material, both printed and electronic, that was available concerning such firms was rather limited and focused on banal items such as; financials and profit/loss statements. Finding scholarly papers or journal reports written about the history of such firms was nearly as difficult as was discovering books (both fiction and non-fiction) about the same subject.

A grand total of five books covering Wall Street history were discovered in the local library system, with only one book on site.  A detailed search at the local university’s library was not nearly as productive as had been hoped either. Not only was there a limited supply of books covering Wall Street’s history, there was even less in the way of books written about specific firms.  Books such as Charles R. Geisst’s; Wall Street: A History and 100 Years of Wall Street provided a detailed and rich history of Wall Street, but not a dearth of specific details concerning companies themselves.