I want to talk about Winston Churchill. What kind of investor was he?

It really kind of makes you a skin crawl some of the things that he got up to along the way.

He was given this advance that was worth close to over 7 million pounds in inflation adjusted or close to 80 million pounds in GDP adjusted terms.

He lost it all.

Oh wow.

You lost it all in the crash in the stock market?

No, no, just trading.

There were these nine trading days ending the 18th of October, where he really went into

overdrive.

He traded $620,000 worth of stock, 80 million pounds worth adjusted for contemporary exchange rates.

And that trading activity just saw him completely wiped out.

Hello and welcome to the story of money, the brand new podcast from the Financial Times,

where we rummaged through the past to make sense of the financial present, and sometimes the future too.

Yep, because if there's one thing that Fineless has taught us, it's that people keep making the same silly mistakes.

And these days, we might use Bloomberg, terminal, spreadsheets and special purpose vehicles,

but you can get into just as much hilarious trouble with a simple abacus.

I'm Gillian Tet, an anthropologist turned FD columnist,

and that means that I love to look at all the hidden rituals and occasional

historical absurdities of the financial world and show you why they matter so much today.

And I'm Robin Wigglesworth. I'm also an FD journalist. I'm editor of our finest blog Alphaville

and someone who has spent far too long staring lovingly at charts.

So together we're going to tell you the story of money,

...