PAUL SAMUELSON, the late Nobel laureate in economics, compared mutual funds to a saloon.
“I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it,” he told Congress in 1967. It made sense to invest in mutual fund companies, Mr. Samuelson said, but not in mutual funds.
