Quotes About Risk

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.

downside to experience. "Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence," he said. The line wasn't his, but he liked it.

a penniless, jobless old college friend who had been offered several loans from banks to buy a house he couldn't afford. That's

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business.

Era como si fuéramos en un avión a diez mil metros que se hubiera averiado y Wachovia todavía tuviera unos cuantos paracaídas a la venta. Nadie más vendía ya paracaídas, pero en realidad tampoco nadie quería creer que se necesitaran. […] Después de eso, el mercado se cerró por completo.»

journalist asked her about it. "What scares me most and what I think about most," said Charity, "is our ability to respond to a new pathogen, maybe one we've never seen before, or an old pathogen, like influenza that's just mutated. The H1N1 pandemic of 1918 was over 100 years ago now. The world is overdue for a pandemic like that, whether it's influenza or something else. And in public health, we know that we have to be prepared for that.

Value investors like Graham and Dodd are so focused on being the last one laughing that they miss a lot of the laughs in between.

Spivey was a worrier. He thought that when a person took risks, the thing that went wrong was usually a thing the person hadn't thought about, and so he tried to think about the things he wouldn't naturally think about.

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all.

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

My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.

He now sat on a billion dollars of Netscape shares and could do whatever the hell he pleased with them. And what pleased him was to put it at great risk.

They sprinkled their money around a lot of different companies and counted on the law of averages to take care of the rest. Clark took a different approach.

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

The VCs could tolerate companies' going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.

If I'm a Trump person I'm going to assume the people in charge of the nuclear weapons are sufficiently alive to the risks around them that they don't need Rick Perry's help. After all, the only thing Trump had to say publicly about Rick Perry during the campaign was that he "should be forced to take an IQ test" and that "he put glasses on so people think he's smart.

What was the point of laying out the odds of a gamble if the person taking it either didn't believe the numbers or didn't want to know them.

Success is about smart risk management, not about wild risk taking.

Run towards the roar,' the old people used to tell the young ones. When faced with great danger and when people panic and seek a false sense of safety, run towards the roaring and go where you fear to go. For only in facing your fears can you find some safety and a way through. When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar.

As far as I know, there's nothing more dangerous than a man who doesn't care if he lives or dies.

Well one tiny poisonous spider can kill a very large man if it bites him in the right place.