He worked in banking and other financial endeavors in the years after college, then signed on in 1922 as an adviser to the brokerage firm Low, Dixon & Company.
While there, he later recounted in his Harvard class's 50th reunion yearbook, "I tried to write a pamphlet on why bonds were the best form of long term investment.
It also garnered him an invitation from the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had favorably reviewed the book in The Nation and Atheneum, to join the Royal Economic Society.
Subsequent studies of the relative long-term performance of stocks vs. bonds, by Alfred Cowles in 1939[4] and Roger G. Ibbotson and Rex Sinquefield in 1976,[5] backed up Smith's 1924 conclusions.
[This quote needs a citation] In Smith's own summary for the New York Times,[7] he wrote I have been unable to find any twenty-year period within which diversification of common stocks has not, in the end, shown better results, both as to income return and safety of principal, than a similar investment in bonds.