Life — January 12, 1922 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "The Brain That Did It" This story satirizes stock market speculation during the early 20th century. A sharp young man enters a broker's office and makes extraordinary profits through margin trading—buying and selling stocks on borrowed money at inflated prices. Within three days, he turns a small profit into thousands of dollars while the market climbs dramatically. Two asylum keepers then arrive, revealing he's an escaped patient they've been hunting. The joke's dark irony: his "brilliant" trading success was actually the reckless behavior of a mentally unstable person. The satire mocks both the speculator's overconfidence and the absurdity of a bull market where anyone—even the insane—could profit through reckless gambling disguised as shrewd investing.