water - like gold and oil before it - is now traded on the stock exchange.

financial counselors and stock experts typically pick winning stocks less often than just throwing darts at lists of them.

70% to 85% of stock brokers and financial advisors (depending upon which study you favor) earn less than the market average for their clients.

because someone forgot to install new code in a computer server, a high speed stock trading company that normally processed us$21 billion in daily trades went bankrupt in 45 minutes.

a 'dead cat bounce' is an investor term for a short recovery on a failing stock or a company's value, as in 'if you throw a dead cat against a wall hard enough, it will bounce, but it's still dead'.

the majority of professionally managed and chosen stock funds underperform the wall street average.

(that's right: we're all paying someone a fee - generally 3.5% or more - to lose our money.)

a chimpanzee with a dartboard picked more successful internet stocks than 6,000 wall street brokers.

roughly 80% of all stocks and currencies are now bought and sold entirely by machines, with no human input at all. because all of the machines watch what the other machines do and act accordingly in microseconds, a single algorithm error could wipe out most of the world's wealth, and it is unlikely that we would ever know what happened.