If the immediate effect of the financial crisis was to devastate the value of investors’ portfolios, the longer-term impact may have been to undermine the received wisdom of investing that informed their whole approach.

More often than not, investors and other participants in the financial markets were not aware of the assumptions they were making. They simply took it for granted that the efficient markets hypothesis always worked, that markets would invariably be liquid, counterparties good for their money, benchmarks useful and buy and hold a sensible investment strategy.