The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability—true stability—is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.
The nice thing about things that are urgent, he liked to say, is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore. I
The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming, Brad said. The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible—that should be alarming, too.
Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.
Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.
Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,
Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.
Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.
Inside a dark pool, no one but the broker who ran it had any idea what was happening.
I lived here my whole life and I've never been to this neighborhood.' And Big Mike finally spoke up. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I got your back.
He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few year...
Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]
And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside
After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen fo...
Worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific cult...
The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which brought us to the fifth risk.
Ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of...
Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary.
These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people. (Losses in the pools Hubler’s group had bet on would eventually reach 40...
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu