Law Students Plot Out Market's Fluctuations

A group of Law School students has recently started taking after their brother graduates across the Charles.

Not contents with devouring law, these future barristers have begun to learn business as well. This undertaking has resulted in the Bull and Bear Club, 53 members strong, devoted to a practical study of finances, particularly the complicated workings of the Stock Exchange.

Bull and Bear members feel their organization fills a definite gap in the Law School curriculum. They cite the fact that even Law School courses on corporations and business are taught from the legal angle and do not provide practical business knowledge. And although many students are only studying law as a background for a business career, courses across the river at the Business School are open only to third-year law men.

So the club's members are bringing practical business knowledge to the Law School. "Our purpose," says Leonard A. Weinberger 3L, "is to make a better lawyer through a keen understanding of the securities world, and to make a better investor out of each student."

The enthusiastic impetus behind the founding of the Bull and Bear has come from two men, Weinberger, who at 22 has been through seven years of college study without taking a business course, and Paul F. Glenn 1L from Princeton.

"Weinberger dropped around early in the fall," Glenn explains, "and the next thing we knew we were discussing our investments and talking about founding the club." Actually, Glenn had the idea before he came to the graduate school. Weinberger supplied a nucleus of interested members from a group of friends with whom he had often discussed investments during the preceding year.

Loss Adviser

On Tuesday, October 14, seven men gathered and elected Weinberger president, Murray Greenblatt 3L vice-president, and Glenn secretary-treasurer. At their first regular meeting 65 students showed up to hear the club's adviser. Louis Loss, professor of law, talk on "Securities Regulations." By December the membership had been temporarily closed at 53, pending the club's discovery of a larger meeting room."

"The club is definitely here to stay." Weinberger asserts. "There ought to be at least a hundred members next year. And we are definitely interested in the possibilities of admitting interested College students."

Guest speakers are the real core of the Bull and Bear organization. Every other Friday the members gather in Hark-ness Commons to eat lunch, listen to, and question leaders in business and finance on aspects of investments. "We are not limited to the Stock Exchange, but it is a basic and interesting place from which to begin." Weinberger explains. Next year the club plans to branch out into the problems of plant management.

But right now its function is strictly limited to learning how to make money through investments. A year long competition is now in progress to see which member, each of whom has theoretically "invested" $10,000 in stocks, can accumulate the greatest profit. Future plans include actual investing of the club's money. Weinberger expects the formation of the members into a legal investing partnership to provide an even keener interest in the club.

News Letter

On behalf of the Bull and Bear, Weinberger and Glenn have been publishing a bi-monthly news letter. The Ticker Tape, commenting on trends and stocks on the exchange. Later in the year they expect to run guest columns by prominent businessmen and financiers.

"Sometimes the market's bullish and sometimes the market's bearish," Glenn explains. "You've got t be able to tell the difference when you invest. That's where the Bull and Bear comes in."

Weinberger is more laconic. "We're saving the boys a trip across the river," he explains.