"The crazy fact won't go away. There are people in and around Wall Street who approach the stock market irrationally — and win," says Max Gunther, the author of this book as well as the heralded global financial bestseller, The Zurich Axioms.

"The baffling fact is, some market players do go on winning forever. I've sought them out and talked to them. You're going to meet them in this book. You'll hear their irrational explanations. Quite possibly you won’t want to believe them. I didn't either.

"I assumed they were all lying to me until they proved otherwise. I made all of them produce documentation and other evidence. And in the end I had to believe them because there was no other choice."

Since that first tulip was traded on that madly speculative exchange in 17th-century Amsterdam, some very special individuals — plungers not in the Merrill Lynch tradition — have been picking winners and harvesting huge profits with uncanny success. How?

They play the market in ways that seem weird to the rest of us — but they win! There are those who feel vibrations, play by the stars, read tarot cards, rely on extrasensory perception, dream dreams, play by numbers.

Crazy? Maybe. Yet every single one of them is rich. You’ll meet them all in this peek at the occult side of the street.

If you want to play the game their way, there’s a toolbox for you inside the book — an appendix to teach you their specialised techniques; with astrology, tarot cards, witchcraft, magic squares, and other uncanny devices.

Each method is carefully explained by the author, a bestselling financial writer of unimpeachable reputation who researched this book with the objectivity of a scientist and who vouches for the accuracy of the results described in it.

Max Gunther (1926-1998), born in England, went to the United States when he was 11 years old, attended schools in New Jersey and received his BA from Princeton University in 1949. He served in the US Army in 1950 and 1951 and was a staff member of Business Week from 1951 to 1955. Mr Gunther then served as a contributing editor of Time for two years. From 1956 he published articles in several magazines, including Playboy. Among his other books are The Zurich Axioms, The Luck Factor, Instant Millionaires, Wall Street & Witchcraft and How to Get Lucky.

Mr Gunther lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where his wife was a real-estate broker. They had three children. The author said that his diversions included surfing and skating, carving chess sets and playing chess, and painting.