André Kostolany

André Kostolany (Budapest, 1906 - Paris, 14 September 1999) was a world renowned stock market expert and speculator. He worked most of his life in France and Germany.

Biography

Kostolany was born in Budapest in 1906, a Hungarian Roman Catholic of Jewish descent. He originally studied Philosophy and History of Art in Budapest but his father forced him to quit his studies and sent him to Paris in 1927, to work as a broker. There he begun his career as a speculator and arbitrageur. When the Germans occupied France in 1940, he fled to New York. From 1941 to 1950 he was the general director and president of the G. Ballai and Co Financing Company. Since 1950 he lived in Paris, Munich and the Côte d’Azur. After WWII he invested heavily in the reconstruction of Germany and the subsequent economic boom helped him build up most of his fortune. In return, Kostolany spent most of his later life writing columns and teaching in seminars about the stockmarket in Germany, where he became famous as a stockmarket expert. His fame was founded in the vast amount of practical experience he had accumulated during his 70 year career, in different trades, in many stockmarkets around the world. He died in 14 September 1999, at the age of 93.

His beliefs

Kostolany, spurred by his successful investment in Germany after WWII, held a deep respect for "the inherent qualities and capabilities of the German people", which, according to him, will lead Germany to a new economic boom, after the German economy absorbs the shock of reunification.

Kostolany was a critic of the gold standard, the monetary system that fixes currency exchange rates to the price of gold, since he believed that whenever it was used, it suppressed economic growth and led to cyclical crises. Consequently, he was a very vocal critic of the fiscal policy of the Bundesbank during the 1980s and 1990s.

Published works

Kostolany was for many years the author of a column in Capital, a stockmarket related magazine in Germany (he wrote a total of 414 articles). He has published a lot of educational material in various languages, including 13 books that sold more than 3 million copies in total. Some of his works (in their original German titles) are:

• Der Friede, den der Dollar bringt (1957)
• ... und was macht der Dollar? Im Irrgarten der Währungsspekulationen (1987)
• Kostolanys Börsenpsychologie (1991)
• Kostolanys Bilanz de Zukunft (1995)
• Die Kunst über Geld nachzudenken (2000)