Quotes from Max Gunther

It is unlikely that God's plan for the universe includes making you rich.

Adventure is what makes life worth living, and the way to have an adventure is to expose yourself to risk.

The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.

The trick, he said over and over again in any number of contexts, is to disregard what everybody tells you until you have thought it through for yourself.

By diversifying, you become a juggler trying to keep too many balls in the air all at once.

I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence

Worry is not a sickness but a sign of health. If you are not worried, you are not risking enough.

The trick is to discern a market – before there is any proof that one exists.

Always take your profit too soon.

Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.

A wise old owl sat on an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard. Why can't we be like that old bird?

The fact is, nobody has the faintest idea of what is going to happen next year, next week, or even tomorrow. If you hope to get anywhere as a speculator, you must get out of the habit of listening to forecasts. It is of the utmost importance that you never take economists, market advisers, or other financial oracles seriously.

Every day at precisely noon a fellow turns up on a busy street corner with a green flag and a bugle. He waves the flag, blows a few notes on the bugle, utters a mysterious incantation, and goes away. A cop, observing this exercise over a period of weeks, finally gets overwhelmed by curiosity. What the hell are you doing? asks the cop. Keeping giraffes away, says the fellow. The cop says, But there are no giraffes around here. The fellow says, Doing a good job, ain't I?

the Zurich Axioms are about the world of money, and that is a world of human events. Human events absolutely cannot be predicted, by any method, by anybody. One of the traps money-world prophets fall into is that they forget they are dealing with human behavior.

Of course, [risk] is a two-way street. But look at it this way. As an ordinary tax-hounded, inflation-raddled income earner, carrying much of the rest of the world on your back, you are in pretty sorry financial state anyhow.

To make any kind of gain in life – a gain of wealth, personal stature, whatever you define as "gain" – you must place some of your material and/or emotional capital at risk. You must make a commitment of money, time, love, something. That is the law of the universe.

I believe good luck comes to people who are ready for it and will use it unselfishly, to help others. I don't believe it often comes to the greedy. As a general rule, the greediest people I know are also the unluckiest.

Why do we go on listening to economic prophets when they plainly know no more about the future than you or I?

Stock speculators are always doing that and are always working themselves into frenzies over it. Such a frenzy can cloud one's judgment to a hazardous degree.

Economists, market advisers, political oracles, and clairvoyants all know this basic rule by heart: if you can't forecast right, forecast often.

Nostradamus wasn't often right, but he sure was often.

If they wanted less, they'd go home with more", he would say. That was his own axiom on greed.

You tend to take it for granted, especially if it came to you rather slowly through the year rather than all at once. Instead of saying, "Hey, wow, I've doubled my money!" or "Hey, look at this, I've got a grand I didn't have before!" you feel as though you have always had this much wealth.

Racetracks close at the end of the day. Once in a great while, a stock market venture of yours might end when a company in which you've invested is absorbed by a bigger company and passes out of existence. But most of the time you will be required to call your own endings.