speculation – Simon Taylor's Blog

28 Jan 2026

Learning from the California gold rush

by Simon Taylor | posted in: Finance sector, History | 2

Selling shovels instead of trying to find gold is an old piece of wisdom about booms and bubbles * It’s a cliché about booms and bubbles that you can probably more dependably make money from selling shovels than actually finding … Continued

Simon is Management Practice Professor of Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School. From 2008-2018 he was the first Director of the University of Cambridge Master of Finance (MFin) degree, and was later the first Director of the University's Global Executive MBA. An economist and former equities analyst at JPMorgan and Citigroup, he teaches on financial markets and institutions, infrastructure finance and the world financial system. He is a Fellow in Management at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he is a member of the investment committee, and a research associate of the Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group, where he specialises in nuclear finance.

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