Quotes About Trading

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.

Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down," says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren't lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO.

Meriwether was the King of the Game, the Liar's Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers' trading floor. On

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.

Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn't elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. "All this information goes through me," he said. "I'm supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn't get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss." It

Danny's trading life was man versus man, but this felt more like man versus nature: The synthetic CDO had become a synthetic natural disaster.

the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

From the social point of view the slow and possibly fraudulent unraveling of a multi-trillion-dollar U.S. bond market was a catastrophe. From the hedge fund trading point of view it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

At Salomon Brothers he traded bonds while being hollered at by six salesmen, eating a morning cheeseburger, and watching Ranieri hold a Bic lighter under the balls of a fellow trader.

I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.

Eighteen months after Netscape was created, and before it had made a dime, Netscape sold shares in itself to the public. On the first day of trading the price of those shares rose from $12 apiece to $48. Three months later it was at $140. It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of the U.S. stock markets, and possibly the most famous.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. It's hard to figure this stuff out.

The simple reason Goldman wasn't making much of the big money now being made in the stock market was that the stock market had become a war of robots, and Goldman's robots were slow.

Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Zoran had no idea whether the market as a whole had finished up or down for the day. Ten minutes after that he could be found, alone, pacing outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. "This is like the first day of the battle against complacency," he said.

This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts.

Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it.

Instead of focusing on profits, trading managers focused on revenues.

If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for "Need Another Seven Astronauts.

The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble.

They were less and less able to buy and sell big chunks of stock in a gulp.

More praise for Liar's Poker Selected as one of BusinessWeek's