Quotes About Risk

The downside risk made longer-maturity PERLS especially attractive to sell. Selling a five-year PERLS to a widow or orphan buyer meant you didn't have to worry about the repayment of principal for five years—an entire career on Wall Street—and even then there was a decent chance the buyer would have bet correctly and made money. Not even a widow or an orphan will complain about receiving $200 instead of $100 at maturity.

From the firm's perspective it was important to make as much money up front as possible on these trades. Take out a big fee, plant the time bomb, walk away, and wait. Of course, after the explosion the derivatives losers would sue, but as long as the firm had made enough money up front and could defend the lawsuit adequately, it would be fine. The important message I took from the disclaimers was this: The way you made money selling derivatives was by trying to blow up your clients.

His stories were so popular that Edwin Lefèvre, the author of the articles in the Saturday Evening Post, assembled them into a bestselling book, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.24 During the years after the book's publication, Livermore lost the entire $100 million he had made betting on the markets, and then shot himself

The math is simple, and laid out in Table 5.6. From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The "sheer numbers game" the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.

Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?

You only live once, and the way I live, once is enough.

You only live once...

A great deal more failure is the result of an excess of caution than of bold experimentation with new ideas. The frontiers of the kingdom of God were never advanced by men and women of caution. —J. Oswald Sanders

If you believe you have a foolproof system you have failed to take into consideration the creativity of fools.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.

Above all, try something.

Anybody who finds it easy to make money on the horses is probably in the dog food business.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Perhaps the angels who fear to tread where fools rush in used to be fools who rushed in.

I was once told that flying involves long hours of boredom, interrupted by moments of extreme fright.

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.

The risk people tend to fear most is not financial loss or wasted time. Rather, it is the risk to their pride, status, and prestige, to what their peers will think of them if they fail.2 In other words, the risk of failure can weigh more heavily than what is at risk.

For instance, when childproof lids on medicine bottles were introduced, it led to a significant increase in the number of child poisonings because parents became less careful about keeping the bottles away from their children.

As a man, I undertake to risk annihilation so that two or three truths can cast their essential light on the world.

Jason: Auf Wiedersehn! (Springt von einer Klippe ins Meer)

The subject of gambling is all encompassing. It combines man's natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future.

If you wanna know how not secure you are, just take a look around. Nothing's secure. Nothing's safe. I don't hate technology, I don't hate hackers, because that's just what comes with it, without those hackers we wouldn't solve the problems we need to solve, especially security.

When a conversation seems hard, when it makes you nervous, when you feel at risk or on edge, remember this core lesson: Conversation is always an act of creativity. We don't have to just be participants in, or victims of, conversations. We can be the makers of the conversations that matter most.

From where most hospital managers sit, Disney looks like a picnic compared to the fiscal, legal, and regulatory nightmare they face every day in a high-risk environment over which they have very little of the kind of control they would have at Disney.