Book excerpt: As a public speaker, this book was written in response to an ever growing chorus of requests for my 'notes'. I have never had notes as the presentations I make are based on 40 years experience in the financial services industry both here and abroad. After so many years, I had begun to question more and more of the assumed wisdom of much of the financial services industry. I left the industry in 2000 to free myself from the shackles of being paid to present a message I no longer believed in and to write this book. I now believe that behavioural finance is more important than economics and as a result, share markets are guided by forces beyond reason. Their short term ups and downs can be linked to collective human behavior, not a logical continuum of cause and effect. In this book, you will learn that history repeats itself; you'll find our why there's no such thing as a market "crash"; why investing for the long term is the surest way to tap the market's riches; why market volatility is not a measure of risk; and why looking backwards "can damage your wealth."