(MONEY Magazine) – Whew! It's been some century, hasn't it? Wars, television, men on the moon, the invention of e-mail--why, it's practically impossible to count the many incredible things that have happened during the past 100 years. Here at MONEY, of course, our focus is on all matters financial, so we thought that before the millennium turns, we ought to take one last glance at a few of the financial highlights--and lowlights--of the century.

Naturally, to compile this list we sifted through hundreds of candidates, and made our judgments only after polling dozens of experts and conducting countless hours of rigorous historical research. (And if you believe that...) But enough chitchat. Let's go to the videotape.

BEST INVESTOR. Oh, sure, there have been lots of great investors during the 20th century, from Bernard Baruch and Benjamin Graham to modern-day gurus such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch and the Beardstown Ladies. We'll grant you that they're all pretty darn good investors (except maybe for the Ladies, who turned out to be cooking the books). But our nominee is someone who's never gotten his due as an investor: Ty Cobb. Yes, that Ty Cobb, the ornery baseball great who retired from the game in 1928 with the astonishing lifetime batting average of .367. What has never been truly appreciated, though, is that Cobb was a Hall of Famer as an investor too. Though his annual salary never topped five digits, he became a millionaire even before he hung up his sharpened spikes. And that was back when a million bucks was real money!

What did Cobb invest in? He took his 1909 World Series money and bought a piece of a copper mine for $3 a share; when he sold the shares just a year later, they were worth $1,000 apiece. But his greatest triumph was his foresighted purchase of two stocks. The first was Coca-Cola, which he began accumulating in 1908 after signing an endorsement contract with the company. The second was a small car company that was eventually purchased by General Motors. In both cases, Cobb showed real vision: Coke at the time was a mere upstart, competing against much more entrenched brands. And as for GM, well, you can imagine what the car industry was like at the beginning of the century. Thanks to his shrewd stock picking, Cobb was that rare thing, an individual investor who thrived during the Depression. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, he was wealthier than he'd been at the beginning of the decade.

BIGGEST CROOK. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! There are so many worthy candidates here--Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Robert Vesco, Bernard Cornfeld. Did you ever read about Richard Whitney, the head of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1930s, who turned out to be a big-time embezzler? But we decided to go with a true trailblazer, a man who showed the way for hundreds--nay, thousands--of future scam artists, a man whose name is now synonymous with fraud. We're speaking, of course, of Charles Ponzi, the creator of the Ponzi scheme.

It was 1919 when Ponzi had his stroke of crooked genius. An Italian immigrant living in Boston, Ponzi convinced investors to buy something called "reply coupons," which he claimed would generate a 50% profit within 90 days. And, by God, they did--so long as Ponzi could find new investors to give him money, which he could then use to pay off the earlier investors. Indeed, according to one account, "Money poured in so fast that his employees.. could hardly count it." He opened branch offices and bought himself a mansion. For about a year he was rich and famous. But then the fraud was exposed, and Ponzi became poor and infamous, winding up in jail, which is where most people who have followed in his storied footsteps have also landed. But they've never stopped trying, have they? That's the real power of Ponzi's scheme.

BEST FINANCIAL SONG. "Love's a Bond," by Stephen Sondheim, written for a musical called Saturday Night, about a group of friends in Brooklyn trying to make a score in the stock market just before the 1929 crash. Sample lyric: "I'm smart as a fox/With bonds and with stocks/I've cornered wheat, alfalfa and rye/But now I'm tired of that hue and cry/Consolidated love is all I buy."

BEST FINANCIAL BOOK TITLE. Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis, is a pretty good title, and I've always admired the title of Connie Bruck's first book, The Predator's Ball, a phrase that neatly encapsulates the Milken era. But the winner is an obscure book published in 1940 called Where Are the Customers' Yachts? Written by a disenchanted ex-broker named Fred Schwed Jr., it amounted to the first full-scale broadside aimed at the brokerage industry. The title, of course, comes from a now famous anecdote, recounted in the book, about a broker showing off his big, new yacht, only to have the other person ask, "Where are the customers' yachts?" Lo, these many years later, variations of this question are still being asked--most recently in the TV ads for online brokers. Schwed's book, by the way, is still in print.

WORST FINANCIAL PREDICTION. "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau"--Professor Irving Fisher, Yale University, September 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith would later describe Fisher as "the most innovative economist of his time," a man who made serious contributions to monetary theory. But it is this unfortunate utterance for which he will be remembered. For our part, we can't help wondering if certain modern-day predictions--why does Dow 36,000 spring to mind?--will someday acquire the same sort of infamy. But, of course, that will have to be decided in the next millennium.

BEST FINANCIAL PREDICTION. No, we're not giving this one to Elaine Garzarelli, she of the table-pounding "sell" just days before the October 1987 crash. Given her subsequent track record, it seems clear that she just happened to be lucky rather than good. Instead, we're giving it to a little-known (and now deceased) futurist named Herman Kahn who, without question, was good and not lucky. In the early 1980s--a time, please recall, when inflation was rampant, interest rates were off the charts, and the stock market was nowhere--Kahn wrote a little book entitled The Coming Boom. It is an amazingly prescient work. Kahn not only predicted that we were about to enter an era of unparalleled prosperity, he also foresaw that it would be driven by the technology industry. He even predicted that computer networks--that is, the Internet--would become an important trend. Alas, he also claimed that we would soon enter a new era of suburban mass transportation. But even the great ones cannot be expected to get 'em all right.

WORST MARKET TIMING. It is hard to come up with a better example of bad timing than Jeffrey Vinik's disastrous move into bonds in late 1995 when he was still managing Fidelity's Magellan Fund. But we think we've found one: Gerry Tsai's decision 30 years earlier to leave Fidelity and strike out on his own.

Do you remember Gerry Tsai? He was the first mutual fund manager to get the kind of press normally reserved for rock stars. As a young man at Fidelity in the early 1960s, he turned in dazzling numbers and came to exemplify the "go-go years," as that era was later dubbed. However, in 1965, after being told he would not become the next head of Fidelity, he quit in a huff and started his own mutual fund, the Manhattan Fund. Hoping to raise $25 million, Tsai was so hot he got nearly 10 times that amount. And, well, you can guess what happened next. The same month that Tsai began his fund--February 1966--the market peaked. By the summer of 1968, the fund ranked 294th out of the nation's 300 largest funds. Tsai bailed out that summer, selling to an insurance company. He later joined American Can, which he turned into a fi- nancial services company and renamed Primerica. Even then, however, the Manhattan Fund debacle stuck to him like glue. "We had one bad year, in 1968, and I've been killed in the press ever since," he growled years later. "Like a ballplayer, right? If you have 10 good games and one lousy game, you're a bum."

MOST IMPORTANT STOCK PICK. Mutual funds were so tarnished in the wake of the go-go years that they seemed headed for extinction until the 1980s bull market brought them back. The man most responsible for their revival was Fidelity's Peter Lynch during his time as the maestro of Magellan. That's why we think Lynch deserves the award for the century's most important stock pick. Which pick? Chrysler, which he began accumulating in the early 1980s, at the very time the car company was on the edge of bankruptcy. Betting heavily that a) the government would not let Chrysler go under, and b) that Lee Iacocca would find a way to return the company to profitability, Lynch began buying up the stock until it was by far the largest position in Magellan's portfolio. Magellan's performance in the early 1980s--up 70% in 1980; 16% in 1981; 48% in 1982, and so on--was attributable in no small part to Lynch's having bet the ranch on Chrysler. (Don't forget: Magellan was a far smaller fund then, so one great pick could make a big difference.)

You can argue that there have been stock picks that made people richer, and perhaps you can even argue that there have been gutsier and more contrarian picks (though we would be hard-pressed to think of any). But you can't really argue that there's ever been a more important stock pick. When small investors began to take notice of the 1980s bull market and began looking for ways to participate in it, what did they find? They found Peter Lynch and his spectacular record--and thus began the great triumph of the mutual fund in the modern era.

BEST FINANCIAL TREND. When you think about it, there is only one financial trend that has spanned virtually the entire century--the trend toward the democratization of finance. That is to say, the trend that has made you as important a player in the market as any Wall Street hedge fund manager. Early this century, the market was unapologetically an insider's game, with small investors serving mostly as lambs to be fleeced. But gradually this changed. The creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, the rise of the great wire houses like Merrill Lynch, the outlawing of insider practices that were once common, the invention of money-market funds and mutual funds, the unfixing of commission rates and the creation of discounters such as Charles Schwab, the rise of the Internet as a vehicle to convey stock information and trade stocks--all of these events, and many others, helped shift the balance of power between Wall Street and Main Street.

Indeed, here at the end of the 20th century, this is no longer a trend. It's here; it's happened. Indisputably, the small investor now has real power. The question for the next century is, What are you going to do with that power?

Joseph Nocera, editor-at-large at Fortune and author of A Piece of the Action, can be reached at big-picture@moneymail.com.