Merrill Lynch
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40 free Merrill Lynch trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Merrill Lynch began as a one-man office on Wall Street and grew into the brokerage that brought stock investing to ordinary American households. Along the way its founders bankrolled chain stores, dabbled in the movie business and built a sales force big enough to earn its own nickname. This quiz collects the fun facts people look for about the firm: how the two founders met, the story behind the name and the logo, the bosses who went on to Washington or into the headlines, the scandals and settlements, and the weekend in 2008 when the firm lost its independence. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the history as you play. It suits finance students, people who work in wealth management, quiz hosts planning a business round, and anyone curious about how a famous Wall Street name was made.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal appears in the famous Merrill Lynch logo that its bankers fought to keep after a 2009 takeover?
Bull
Bull branding was due to be scrapped by Merrill's new owner in 2009, until its executives lobbied to keep it and won the right to print it on their business cards.
Q 02Which firm agreed to buy Merrill Lynch for about $50 billion in stock at the height of the 2008 financial crisis?
Bank of America
Bank of America struck the deal over a single weekend in September 2008, paying a 70 percent premium to Merrill's last share price; the takeover closed in January 2009.
Q 03On the same weekend in September 2008 that Merrill Lynch sold itself, which rival Wall Street bank went bankrupt?
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers' collapse made rivals fear Merrill Lynch would be next: some banks had considered halting their trading with Merrill if Lehman went under.
Q 04Merrill Lynch co-founder Charles Merrill engineered the 1926 merger that created which American grocery chain?
Safeway
Safeway grew to more than 3,500 stores by 1931 with Merrill Lynch financing its takeovers of other chains, and Charles Merrill stayed on as its largest shareholder.
Q 05Merrill Lynch was the first customer for the market-data terminal created by which New York City mayor?
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg sold Merrill Lynch 20 terminals and a 30 percent stake in his young company for $30 million; in 2008 Merrill sold its last 20 percent back for a reported $4.43 billion.
Q 06James Merrill, poet son of Merrill Lynch's co-founder, built an epic poem from messages received through which device?
A Ouija board
A Ouija board supplied two decades of séance messages for The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page epic in which James Merrill gave voices to the dead, W. H. Auden among them.
Q 07Until 1938, the official name of Merrill Lynch carried which punctuation mark between its two founders' surnames?
A comma
A comma split the two surnames from 1915, when Edmund Lynch's arrival turned Charles E. Merrill & Co. into Merrill, Lynch & Co., until the firm dropped it in 1938.
Q 08Merrill Lynch's founders became friends after sharing a room at a boarding house run by which organization?
The YMCA
The YMCA rented Edmund Lynch a room in New York in 1907, and newcomer Charles Merrill moved in with him while he hunted for a place of his own.
Q 09Which Merrill Lynch chairman went to Washington in 1981 as Treasury Secretary under President Ronald Reagan?
Donald Regan
Donald Regan joined Merrill Lynch as a trainee in 1946 and ran it from 1971; in Washington he later swapped jobs with James Baker to become White House chief of staff.
Q 10A grandson of Merrill Lynch founder Charles Merrill led the group that took over which baseball team in 1993?
San Francisco Giants
San Francisco Giants boss Peter Magowan stopped a planned sale to a Florida group, signed Barry Bonds and pushed through the team's privately funded ballpark.
Q 11Merrill Lynch's huge network of financial advisors, some 15,000 strong, earned which Wall Street nickname?
The Thundering Herd
The Thundering Herd label goes back to the 1940s, when a merger left the firm with a name so long that outsiders also called it We the People.
Q 12Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch was a major investor in the five-and-dime chain that became which discount retailer?
Kmart
Kmart was the later name of the S. S. Kresge Corporation, one of several young chain stores, J. C. Penney among them, that Merrill Lynch helped to finance.
Q 13Merrill Lynch bankers were convicted in 2004 over a deal to buy Nigerian power barges from which energy company?
Enron
Q 21Charles Merrill opened the Wall Street firm that became Merrill Lynch in the same year that which war began?
World War I
World War I began in the summer of 1914, the same year Charles E. Merrill & Co. opened for business at 7 Wall Street; the Lynch name was added in 1915.
Q 22Merrill Lynch paid $1.3 billion in 2006 for First Franklin, one of America's largest lenders of which kind of loan?
Subprime mortgages
Subprime mortgages from First Franklin were meant to feed Merrill's bond-packaging business; it stopped lending through the firm in March 2008, about fifteen months after the purchase.
Q 23In 1964 Merrill Lynch became the first American securities firm to set up a presence in which Asian country?
Japan
Enron booked about $12 million in profit from the barge deal, which prosecutors called a sham; an appeals court threw out the Merrill bankers' fraud convictions in 2006.
Q 14Merrill Lynch received $6.8 billion in 2008 from the US government's bailout of which giant insurance company?
AIG
AIG had sold Merrill protection on its investments, so part of the taxpayer money sent to rescue the insurer passed straight on to the brokerage.
Q 15Which famously quiet president did a Merrill Lynch founder warn about stock speculation before the 1929 crash?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge did not act on the warning; the firm, sure a crash was coming, told its own clients in 1928 to sell stocks and pay down their debts.
Q 16Which Merrill Lynch chief apologized after spending $1.22 million of company money redecorating his office in 2008?
John Thain
John Thain's bill included $131,000 for rugs, $68,000 for an antique credenza and $1,100 for a wastebasket; he repaid the full cost after it came to light in 2009.
Q 17Which radical group accidentally blew up a New York townhouse once owned by Merrill Lynch founder Charles Merrill?
The Weather Underground
The Weather Underground set off its own dynamite by accident at 18 West 11th Street on March 6, 1970; Merrill had owned the Greenwich Village house in the 1920s.
Q 18Merrill Lynch paid $400 million in 1998 over risky investments that had bankrupted which California county?
Orange
Orange County lost $1.69 billion on treasurer Robert Citron's bets and filed for bankruptcy in December 1994; Merrill settled without admitting liability.
Q 19Henry Blodget, a Merrill Lynch analyst barred from the securities industry for life, later co-founded which news site?
Business Insider
Business Insider began in 2007 as Silicon Alley Insider with Blodget as chief executive, four years after regulators charged him over misleading dot-com research.
Q 20Who became the first African-American chief of a major Wall Street firm when he took over Merrill Lynch in 2002?
Stanley O'Neal
Stanley O'Neal grew up on his grandfather's Alabama farm and was a supervisor at a General Motors plant before Harvard Business School; he resigned in 2007 as the firm's losses mounted.
Japan became a far bigger market for Merrill in 1998, when it took over the retail operations of the failed Yamaichi Securities.
Q 24Merrill Lynch was once called the Catholic firm of Wall Street because most of its executives shared which ancestry?
Irish
Irish Catholics filled most of Merrill's top jobs, and the firm's culture of job security was nicknamed Mother Merrill.
Q 25Merrill Lynch built a permanent Investment Information Center inside which busy New York City landmark?
Grand Central Station
Grand Central Station travelers could pick up the firm's educational brochures there, part of a postwar push that also included pioneering investment seminars for women.
Q 26In 2006 Merrill Lynch swapped its fund-management arm for a 49.5 percent stake in which asset manager?
BlackRock
BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven partners, took in Merrill's fund business in a deal that halved the holding of its earlier big shareholder, PNC.
Q 27Which New York attorney general published private Merrill Lynch emails in 2002 that contradicted its stock research?
Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer's release of the emails pushed Merrill to pay $100 million and promise to separate its stock research from its investment banking.
Q 28The merger that added Fenner to Merrill Lynch's name brought in a cotton-trading brokerage from which southern city?
New Orleans
New Orleans was home to Charles Fenner's firm, then America's second-largest brokerage; Confederate president Jefferson Davis had died in the Fenner family home there.
Q 29Merrill Lynch founder Charles Merrill and longtime chief Winthrop Smith both studied at which Massachusetts college?
Amherst
Amherst College later received Merrill's Southampton estate, The Orchard, as a gift, and its science center carries his name.
Q 30Pathé Exchange, the film company Merrill Lynch took control of in 1921, was later absorbed by which Hollywood studio?
RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures bought the studio in January 1931; the year after Merrill Lynch took its stake, Pathé had released the landmark documentary Nanook of the North.