Quotes from Roger Lowenstein

As Keyes noted, one bet soundly considered is preferable to many poorly understood.

Graham's first goal was never to make money—it was to avoid losing any.

You can overintellectualize these Greek letters," Pflug reflected, referring to the alphas, betas, and gammas in the option trader's argot. "One Greek word that ought to be in there is hubris.

Once a typhoon breaks loose in markets, there is no telling where it will go.

The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity." -- Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99

When losses mount, leveraged investors such as Long-Term are forced to sell, lest their losses overwhelm them. When a firm has to sell in a market without buyers, prices run to the extremes beyond the bell curve.

People, including many of Buffett's friends, were intimidated by Munger's weighty discourses on black holes and Einstein, not to mention his contemptuous manner. Buffett's friend Roxanne Brandt once remarked that the only hospital she knew of in Los Angeles was Cedar Sinai Medical Center. Munger shot back, "That's because you're Jewish.

Lawrence Summers, now the U.S. Treasury secretary , told The Wall Street Journal after the crash, "The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

As Peter Bernstein has written, nature's pattern emerges only from the chaotic disorder of many random events.

But after Kapor took Merton's finance course, he decided that quantitative finance was less a science than a faith - a doctrine for ideologues "blinded by the power of the model." It appealed to intellectuals who craved a sense of order but could lead them disastrously astray if markets moved outside the model.