This is a challenging history of the role of financial speculation from early modern times to the end of the 20th century. Focusing on speculation as it developed in the world's leading stock markets, the story starts with the tulipomania in 17th-century Holland, then moves to Britain with accounts of famous speculative manias (the South Sea Bubble, Railway mania) and to America with chapters on the roaring twenties, the junk bond revolution of the 1980s and finally the bubble economy of Japan in the 1980s.