Over the last 20 years, investors have increasingly come to regard investing in stocks about the same as putting money in the bank—except they got a higher return. This belief became so pervasive that, as recently as 2000, the government in Washington was still talking about putting part of the Social Security account into securities in order to earn a higher return. After the Nasdaq crash, that plan was quietly dropped. Even investors who researched stocks before buying them either mostly used computer programs that rely on past action repeating more or less exactly in order to predict future buy or sell points, or they used Internet advice which in many cases was nothing more than thinly disguised sales pitches.

There is an old adage which says that knowledge can be communicated but wisdom has to be self-taught. I hope that, by the end of this book, you will have enough knowledge to evolve your own market wisdom. With the coming of the Internet, investors were so focused on acquiring the latest information on securities that many never bothered to learn how that information could be best used.