See this woman right here? Her name is Hetty Green, better known as “The Witch of Wall Street”. This photo was taken around 1905.
Hetty Green circa 1905
Forget Warren Buffet, Benjamin Graham or George Soros. These great investment gurus pale in comparison to Hetty Green. When it came to investing, she was ruthless, shrewd, intelligent and unorthodox, even among male counterparts of her day.
Henrietta “Hetty” Howland Robinson was born November 21, 1834, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the only daughter of a prosperous Quaker whaling family (A younger brother died in infancy) —an odd combination that portended both her astonishing wealth and peculiar frugality. Because of her mother’s delicate health, young Hetty was often left in the care of her father and grandfather, who raised her with a healthy flair for money. At a tender young age, she learned to read stock market reports from newspapers.As she marched along the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan, New York, she wore only her trademark simple black dress with frayed hems while clutching a black handbag and talking to no one.
Possibly because of the stiff competition of the mostly male-dominated business environment at Wall Street, and partly because of her usually stern dress (due mainly to her frugality, but perhaps in part related to her Quaker upbringing), she was given the nickname "The Witch of Wall Street" .
A better explanation of how Hetty Green earned her nickname was perhaps, her deftness in picking stocks. When it came to picking stocks she was subtle, shrewd and fiercely meticulous. She would spend hours studying financial data and newspapers at the offices of the Seaboard National Bank in downtown Manhattan, where she held a bank account, and used it as an excuse to conduct much of her business surrounded by suitcases full of newspapers because she did not want to pay rent for her own office. Although frugal in most of her daily undertakings, she never missed a copy of her favorite newspaper. Unfounded rumors even claimed that she ate only oatmeal, heated on the office radiator.
At Wall Street, men would crowd around her just to get a glimpse of which stock she was about to pick. But Hetty Green was not a speculator, unlike her husband, from whom they divorced later due his outgoing, speculative nature. She was a ruthless hoarder of stocks, only buying or selling a particular stock after spending a long time studying volumes of financial information and newspapers. “I buy when things are low and nobody wants them,” she told the New York Times in 1905. “I keep them until they go up and people are anxious to buy.” In one particularly astute move, she sensed in 1907 that the market was overvalued, and called in all her loans. When the market crashed, she swooped in and bought low, the very model of a modern vulture capitalist.
That Hetty Green was a shrewd businesswoman was in no doubt. She invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, railroads and mines, and lent money while acquiring numerous mortgages.
She had a knack for real estate deals, snapping up foreclosed properties, buying and selling railroads. She issued high-interest loans to desperate banks and cities in crisis. The City of New York came to Hetty for loans to keep the city afloat on several occasions, most particularly during the Panic of 1907; she wrote a check for $1.1 million and took her payment in short-term revenue bonds. Keenly detail-oriented, she would travel thousands of miles alone—in an era when few women would dare travel unescorted—to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.
Paranoid that men were only after her money (and they were), she didn’t get married until she was 33. Her husband, Edward Henry Green had his own relatively modest wealth, though he wasn’t as clever or as thrifty as his wife. They had two children—Ned and Sylvia.
Money put a strain on their relationship—where she was disciplined, he was free-wheeling and speculative. She tried to keep her finances separate from his in an era where that was unheard of. Edward eventually moved out of the house, but when he became ill, she nursed him in the months before his death. Hetty adopted a widow’s simple black dress “of the plainest material,” for the rest of her days according to a 1909 article in the Washington Post.
Despite her wealth, the extremely frugal life she led hints at an obsession bordering on instability. Her children wore second-hand clothes. When her son injured his leg in an accident, she took him to a free clinic for treatment and left when doctors recognized her and demanded payment. The leg didn’t heal properly and had to be amputated. She treated herself for a hernia by jamming a stick in her abdomen and holding it in place with her underwear.
She was not unaware of the figure she portrayed and seemed to resent the opinions some had of her. “I am not a hard woman,” Hetty Green told a reporter. “But because I do not have a secretary to announce every kind act I perform, I am called close and mean and stingy. I am a Quaker, and I am trying to live up to the tenets of that faith. That is why I dress plainly and live quietly. No other kind of life would please me.”
When she died at age 81, in 1916, the New York Times called Hetty Green the “wealthiest woman in the United States.” At the time, she had in liquid assets alone, an estimated $100 million — Or in today’s dollars, $2.3 billion. (Today, the richest woman in the U.S. is Alice Walton, a daughter of the Wal-Mart founder, with a net worth of $38.2 billion, according to Forbes magazine.)
Ironically after her death, her children indulged in the kind of lives that would make her roll over in her grave. Her son, Ned became a collector with a taste for the finer things in life. When daughter Sylvia died in 1961, she left almost her entire estate worth around $443 million to charity.
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