Quotes About Risk

If the player had broken his neck the night before the NBA draft, for instance, it would be nice to know. But if you had asked Daryl Morey in 2006 to choose between his model and a roomful of basketball scouts, he'd have taken his model.

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment." The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean

They were "risk averse." But what was this thing that everyone had been calling "risk aversion?" It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these crappy assets they're holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they'd fetch in a fire sale.

The absence of pandemic prevention was another example of a deficiency in the system.

I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe," said Alderson. "They don't get criticized for it.

Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment," said his friend Avishai Margalit, "and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

This was extreme. An NFL football field is a tightly strung economy. Everything on it comes at a price. Take

This one they called "framing." Simply by changing the description of a situation, and making a gain seem like a loss, you could cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk, and turn them from risk avoiding to risk seeking.

any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

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 not just program management.

chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.

The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot," Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you'd go broke.

The professors argued that Netscape courted disaster from the start, by taunting Microsoft. "Mooning the Giant

There is no such thing as a riskless asset. The reason an asset pays a return is that it carries risk.

All the risks are science-based," said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. "You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.

Redelmeier was newly struck by the inability of human beings to judge risks, even when their misjudgment might kill them.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.