Son of Scarsdale Fats

To the world beyond Wall Street, most financial trade publications seem as dull and dreary as a stock prospectus. A new publication in this ar cane area of journalism, however, is fast proving that writing about high finance can be both exciting and amusing. Its editor is 'Adam Smith,' the author of the irreverent and humorous bestseller, The Money Game. As Wall Street and publishing circles know by now, Smith is really George J.W. Good man, 38, a former Rhodes scholar, journalist (TIME, FORTUNE), novelist and screenwriter (The Wheeler Dealers). Considerably less well known is Good man's latest interest, a monthly financial magazine called the Institutional Investor (circ. 21,000). Despite its forbidding name, I-I is the brightest addition to the marketplace since one of The Mon ey Game's financial wizards, "Scarsdale Fats," first appeared in the Sunday mag azine of the late New York World Jour nal Tribune.

Touch of the Romans. I-I is edited for performance-minded money man agers like Scarsdale, but it is also finding an increasing audience among men who decide what stocks will be bought and sold by mutual funds, banks, universities, insurance companies and pen sion systems. I-I figures that its readers could easily muster assets of well over $400 billions -- more than enough to pay off the national debt.

Now 20 months old, I-I is entertaining as well as profitable. Behind its TIME-sized, pop-art covers often lurk such pro vocative questions as "Is 35 over the hill these days?" (on Wall Street, that is) and "What makes Dallas that way?" It also prints lively and not altogether flattering profiles of leading moneymen.

A notable journalistic coup was its re cent interview with the shadowy Alfred Winslow Jones, father of Wall Street's current investment sensation, the hedge fund (whose profit-at-high-risk philosophy aims at taking advantage of both upward and downward swings of the market). Touches of humorous erudition are sprinkled throughout. A regular monthly column, for example, is called "Haruspex," for the Roman soothsay ers who divined the future by poking through the entrails of sacrificial animals.

Even if they do not base their day-to-day investing decisions on the magazine, moneymen find its articles hard to put down. Some months ago, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener of the Hudson Institute think tank both predicted more than 100 technological breakthroughs that might win chips for investors in the year 2000. On their list: genetic control of heredity, creation of artificial life, extrasensory perception, human hibernation. Says Goodman: "This isn't just a trade magazine. People read it be cause it's fun."

Institutional Investor's founder, Gilbert E. Kaplan, 21, reflects his collaborator's high camp style. An economist and former law student ("I'm just five credits shy of a degree"), Kaplan wears mod suits, sports Edwardian sideburns, and keeps a half-century-old grandfather clock that chimes like Big Ben in his riverview Manhattan office. Two and a half years ago, while he was working as an economic planner for the American Stock Exchange, he decided that the growing field of money managing needed a publication of its own. With a bankroll of $250,000 (his chief angel was Gerald Bronfman of the Canadian-whisky family), he tried to buy the ailing Magazine of Wall Street. When that deal failed, he started his own magazine and brought Goodman in to give it the breezy 'Adam Smith' touch.

The precocious publisher is already in the thick of other promising ventures. Kaplan has begun a highly successful annual conference for institutional investors (the first one attracted 1,500 people at $175 per head). He also puts out several business directories, has made a deal with Random House to publish an anthology of I-I profiles tentatively called The Money Managers. Next month he and Goodman plan to kick off a new quarterly that will bring 'Adam Smith' to the tradition-bound world of merchant banks and corporate financing.

Most exciting of all is Kaplan's plan to introduce "electronic publishing" to Wall Street. Cribbing the Meet the Press formula, he will video-tape regular 40-minute interviews with top business figures. Kaplan has already signed up 70 subscribers (cost $6,300 a year, including video-tape playback machinery). These private closeups of industrial leaders are to start going out in the mails each week next January. "We never intended to stick with only Institutional Investor" explains Kaplan. "We think of it as our flagship, whose prestige will help start other enterprises."

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