Telegraph readers, I salute you. After this column last week offered a bottle of champagne for the best top-of-the-market signal that should have alerted us to the looming credit crunch, there were 400 postings on the website and about 20 letters in my mailbag.

Your correspondence contained a delightful mix of shrewd insight, bitter experience, and one or two ideas that, if I were generous, indicated a need for mild sedatives. The majority, however, were observations from the University of Real Life, lessons drawn from the daily grind in a bubble economy.

This column suggested that the most reliable signpost to the end for irrational exuberance had been the £2.2bn stock market flotation of Mike Ashley's Sports Direct, a rag-bag of leisure brands that regards corporate governance as a theoretical concept. In less than two years, under …