The View from the Office.

I caught up with Justin Baer last night at a signing for his new book: House of Fidelity: The Rise of the Johnson Dynasty and the Company That Changed American Investing. The event was at Syracuse University’s Lubin House on the Upper East Side.

Justin has spent more than a quarter century as a journalist, mainly focused on writing and editing stories about Wall Street, covering firms including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.

Currently, he’s an editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he’s worked for the past 15 years. Before that, he was at the Financial Times and Bloomberg, where we were colleagues.

The House of Fidelity is his first book. It was just published by Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette.

The story begins when Edward C. Johnson 2d founded Fidelity in 1946 and follows the trajectory of modern finance as the firm became a financial colossus. It covers the meteoric rise of star fund manager Peter Lynch and Fidelity’s role in promoting 401(k) retirement plans.

Justin told me a lot of the drama in the book centers around familial succession battles in the 1970s as Ned Johnson took over, and again in the 2010s as his daughter Abby Johnson took the reins.

Justin said he hasn’t heard how Abby Johnson reacted to the book but noted it was rigorously fact checked so they knew what was coming.

The book has received positive reviews. The Financial Times called the book “a welcome window” into one of the most important financial companies in the US. William D. Cohan, the author of Power Failure, called it “a must read.” Mohamed El-Erian, the former PIMCO CEO, praised how Justin weaves family dynamics into the evolution of the broader financial system.

One unexpected benefit of attending the party was that I ran into a number of former Bloomberg News colleagues, including Erik Schatzker, Lisa Friedman and Kevin Reynolds and met some WSJ legends including Randall Smith and Aaron Lucchetti.

I’m just starting to read the book now, but I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the growth of the modern mutual fund industry.

You can connect with Justin via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.