A few years ago, I wrote a magazine article on the mathematics of the stock market. The assignment required that I spend considerable time interviewing the experts and studying the various theories, which is to say, whether stocks engage in a random walk of unpredictable fluctuations or whether their movements can be predetermined. If the latter is true, then the market is indeed a game that can be beaten by the better players, not just the lucky ones. I concluded, as do most experts and virtually all experimental studies on the subject, that for 99.99 percent or so of traders, buying a stock is a proposition, over the short term, at least, no more predictable than a coin toss, and losing money is as likely a result as making it. The remaining infinitesimal fraction comprises those pros who have spent fortunes on computing systems that will sift through vast amounts of data and find the exceedingly subtle patterns in the ebb and flow of stocks. They are also the ones who have the financial wherewithal to profit from those patterns before they vanish.

The "new economy" arrived, however, shortly after the publication of my article. I watched my friends and relatives, none of whom had shown particular signs of genius, cash in on the explosive growth of high-tech, Internet and dot-com stocks. New rules were in effect, I was told, and money could be made risk-free and hand-over-fist. After 18 months of passive-aggressive skepticism, I decided that perhaps I was wrong and they were right, and I bought a few tech stocks. The market then crashed, as the new economy revealed itself to be the old economy in the emperor's new clothes, and it took the bulk of my investment with it.