Fish Fry A FOOL AND HIS MONEY: THE ODYSSEY OF AN AVERAGE INVESTOR by John Rothchild Viking; 251 pages; $17.95

By John Skow

Poker players rejoice when they detect a fish -- a cheerful, tireless, well- funded loser -- radiating stupidity from across the green felt. Poker, of course, is a low pastime, whereas investment counseling, stockbroking and commodities trading are honorable professions. Still, suggests amateur Investor John Rothchild in this wry and funny confession, the professional gents and ladies of the financial markets are by no means reluctant to gnaw underachieving seafood when it presents itself.

No one, of course, has ever spied a fish in the bathroom mirror while shaving. Rothchild, an author and free-lance journalist when he is not playing the market, had earlier broken about even in some desultory investments ("Breaking even," he explains in a helpful Fool's Glossary, means a "loss as explained to family, friends, and neighbors"). This, he felt, was because he did not know what he was doing. His new idea was logical: take a year to learn as much as possible about investing, then live solvently ever after. His stake was about $16,500, accumulated by selling an old car and a used dinghy and by throwing in the first wad of a healthy advance from the sort of publisher you would, on first thought, like to see across a poker table.

Hah. The publisher's only sensible gamble, of course, was that Rothchild would lose. Had the nearly impossible happened and Rothchild transformed his modest pile into $5 million or $10 million, the book project would have lost its urgency. If he had finished the year with, say, $25,500, a respectable profit of more than 50%, a book would have been pointless. Who needs How I Made $9,000 by Incredibly Shrewd Investing? Though Rothchild may not have realized this at the outset, only calamity could produce a level of melodrama salable in bookstores. (He is not a member of the illustrious European banking family, which spells its name Rothschild and usually surmounts calamity.)

The apprentice stashed his fund temporarily in a savings and loan account at a contemptible 5 1/2% (which, he later concluded, would have netted him $1,200 over the period of his adventures) and went looking for trouble. A financial consultant offered to relieve him of all anxiety, and of a fee of 2% to 4% of his assets, by drawing up a sensible budget. This was not the sort of trouble Rothchild had in mind. He studied hard, listened carefully to a succession of brokers and analysts, and lost steadily. His only good advice came from an astrological marketeer who explained that "electrically charged investors turn positive or negative in sympathy with the positive or negative atmospheric polarity." This seer said to buy the March 25 S&P-100 call options. Rothchild risked $777.16 and made $400 in two weeks.

He did eventually make another score of $265 on the commodities market, but his losses tended to be in the four-figure range. In return he made some useful discoveries, including the arresting information that while it takes two years to become a licensed plumber and six months to get your beauty- parlor operator's ticket, you can become a stockbroker in four months, with most of the class time devoted to sales technique, not corporate earnings reports. He began to formulate sound investing principles, such as "Never trust a broker whose suit is worth more than your portfolio." He found a futures-trading expert who admitted that traders, arbitragers and brokers "feed off the public customer, who is the dinner." For a trifling $285, he bought hog futures representing 30,000 lbs. of meat, hoping wistfully to drive up the price by eating lots of pork chops. He learned that a correction is a "short-term downswing in an otherwise rising market." "See also," says his Fool's Glossary, "Russian Correction of 1917, World Corrections I and II, the Bubonic Correction, etc."

In the end, Rothchild admits, he lost everything but $800 of his original stake, an achievement even more remarkable because he accomplished it before the 500-point correction of Black Monday, last Oct. 19. Having foresightedly gone broke earlier in the year, he was thus in a position to tell admirers that he had got out of the market before the crash. Those fish who invested no money in the market because they had none are made to feel much cleverer than Rothchild or, for that matter, than Ivan Boesky, which is an excellent return on a $17.95 investment.