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One cheer for James K. Glassman, the investment writer and co-author, in 1999, of “Dow 36,000.” That book, published when the US stock market was near a dot-com-charged speculative peak, urged investors to load up on shares. The Dow, the authors prophesied, would reach the gaudy figure in their title most likely in “three to five years.”

The market crashed soon after. The Dow didn’t get close to 36,000, and the book became a symbol of New Economy hysteria.

Now, Glassman, the lead author, has published an apologia. “I was wrong,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed promoting his latest book, “Safety Net.” In the spirit of curiosity, Glassman asks “What happened” and sallies forth with this: “The world changed. While history is usually the best guide to the future, it is far from perfect.”

Give Glassman credit for fessing up. But still, his explanation is troubling. History is always capable of doing something new. So when we pick an investment guru, we want to make sure the advice will endure for longer than the latest headlines.

According to Glassman, two bombshells upended his forecast. One is that US economic growth slowed relative to those of emerging countries. For Glassman to call this a “change” is like an insurance underwriter blaming stormy weather. Throughout history, growth rates have been subject to change. No prudent analyst would overlook such a possibility.

As for Glassman’s second “change,” back in the days when he was writing “36,000,” he considered “only one kind of risk” — price volatility. Volatility is what you can learn from a price chart. If markets were dice, charts would be sufficient. Roll enough dice and you will discover that snake eyes occur once in every 36 rolls. And those would be dependable odds in the future.

But markets, Glassman learned, are also subject to “a second kind of risk” — better known as uncertainty. This refers to risks that can’t be captured in price data, such as the chance of a terrorist incident or a depression. You can’t quantify the odds of a depression simply by knowing that we had one in the 1930s and haven’t had one since.

This revelation isn’t a “change” either. Economists such as Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes wrote about uncertainty early in the 20th century. Modern investors have oft learned (to their chagrin) that models based on volatility don’t capture all relevant risks. This isn’t new. It is only new to Glassman.

I think he has papered over the real story of why “36,000” was so off base. It wasn’t that history changed — it was the authors’ expectation that the market environment was likely to persist.

“Some say the stock market is the most powerful and efficient computing device in the world,” they wrote. And: “Today’s price reflects all known information.” And again, “We see the market as efficient.” In other words, markets are computers. They don’t get thrown off by exuberance or self- delusion; they simply reflect “known information.”

Glassman’s faith in markets explains why he has consistently been scornful of government regulation. (Why regulate markets if they are basically perfect?)

Apparently, he has turned a new leaf. Glassman now writes of Keynsian uncertainty and concedes that the market is not so efficient — i.e., that some investors can beat it. And where once he was ebullient, now he is chastened. “Safety Net” promotes a strategy that “fits the reality and danger of our times.”

Glassman argues for reducing exposure to US stocks, investing in “bear funds,” and hedging through put options. He is full of praise for “value” stocks — by which he means, stocks that trade at low multiples of assets or earnings.

It may be that Glassman has metamorphosed into a value investor like his seeming hero, Warren Buffett. But books like his make me nervous. Glassman seems to like value stocks because they performed in the past. You could have said that about Lucent in 1999.

What is missing is a deep exploration of why value stocks do better. One looks for a patient analyst scouring the market for bargains; what one finds is a promoter spewing statistics on asset allocations.

It sounds to me that Glassman is doing exactly what he did in 1999: proposing a strategy that is guaranteed to work as long as the future mirrors the recent past.

A real safety net isn’t to be found in a preference for any class of assets over another but, rather, in the discipline of bottom-up security analysis — a timeless rather than a trendy approach that urges looking for underpriced securities wherever they reside. It requires real labor, of the sort that cannot be reduced to boldface headings.

Glassman likens his experience and in some ways his approach to that of Buffett, but don’t be fooled. Buffett does not rewrite his investment philosophy with every passing decade.

Roger Lowenstein is a Bloomberg News columnist.