I just finished reading this, and I can understand why it is a classic book. It's a great story of the ebb and flow of fortune, in both senses of the word. The story is apparently very true to life of real stock market behavior, albeit regulation is better these days.

I particularly liked the comment by the expert investor who is the subject of the book, talking about the strange asymmetry in the law when it comes to positive and negative remarks. You can be sued for libel or defamation for making a baseless negative remark that harms someone; but you can make any kind of positive remark about a share, a company, a product, and there's little that can be done about it. Obviously the trade descriptions act and no doubt similar stock legistlation is around these days, but fundamentally there is not that much that can be done to prevent people making upbeat claims about things.

The book if full of clever stories illustrating how blindly most people invest — in fact, how they are even more eager to follow tips when they are anonymous and baseless. Give people a detailed reason why soemthing will happen, and their eyes glaze over; give them a "hot tip", and they get excited. There's a great story in there about an investor following a tip without knowing where it comes from; when he later finds out that the tip came from his father-in-law, he says "Why on Earth didn't you say it was him?" — an anonymous tip was thought better than a tip from someone he actually knew, when clearly the reverse should be true in all circumstances.

I would recommend this book as the perfect cure for anyone foolish enough to believe they can beat the stock market, or any game that they know less about than the experts and insiders. But as Lefèvre says himself in the book, people reading it were only encouraged to invest all the more, because they, like everyone else, believed they would be the one person smart enough to beat the system. People are fools, and never change.