Some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.
Lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversati...
There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It’s impossible to know for sure. What will the price of oil be in ten years? was such a question. That...
There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst...
There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand,...
There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. Program management is n...
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for y...
The trouble, Danny suspected, was that the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something o...
The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The H...
The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.
She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they dro...
RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to talk about your experience of being...
It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.
It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.
Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the good things that ultimately don’t matter to most businesses there is a tycoon struggling to get out.
If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s...
If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.
I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
I have this theory, says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. Wall Street makes its best producers intomanagers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made amanager...