Dramatic Sales Writing

And here's another posting, this one reaction favorably
to James's opinion that probably only a few of the
nearly 300 copywriting students attending the 2004
AWAI Bootcamp knew who Benjamin Graham was.


Thanks for the encouragement, James.

By that I mean -- if only a handful of AWAI's most dedicated
students (the ones at Bootcamp) know who Benjamin
Graham is, there's obviously very little competition for
copywriting for financial products.

I shouldn't imply it's impossible for anyone to succeed
there without already knowing some basic stuff . . .

. . . but, if you're starting out without knowing about
the father of Value investing, how do you get to
writing about gold mines or constructing synthetic
puts and calls with commodities contracts?

The Fundraising course has an interesting interview by
Robert Bly of Jerry Huntzinger (who's a top fundraising
copywriter) where they sort of compare notes -- and
Bly says that many top copywriters are getting out of
the financial field because it's gotten so complex.

And several of the top copywriters interviewed in
the Financial course echo that same theme. They
obviously haven't let it stop them, but they said
there is a ton of information to digest on their
packages. Where research for another kind of package
might take up 40% of their time, for financial
packages it's 70%.

And if you don't already know who Benjamin Graham
is . . .

And to answer your question about the stock market -- it
depends on what my client thinks!

(In the above interviews, both Bob Bly and another
financial copywriter say that they have worked
simultaneously on packages that had totally
opposite opinions on market direction.)

I think this:

In the long run bull stock market that began on
Wall Street about 200 years ago, all bear markets
are temporary retracements, even the Great Depression.

This bull market will continue until civilization
ends in catastrophe, in which case we'll either be
dead or too busy just surviving to care about
our stock portfolios :)