Quotes About Investment

The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don't make loans to people who can't repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don't keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks

The very first day, we said, 'There's going to come a time when we're going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It's going to blow up. We just don't know how or when.

As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could more clearly be called a "subprime loan," but the bond market didn't want to be clear.

The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. "When things go wrong it's their problem

In my entire life I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, 'Short my market

He didn't buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.

A year or so before he had bought and sold a million shares in @Home, and made a quick $45 million.

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley.

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

Healtheon was worth whatever investors felt like paying for it, and that depended largely on public opinion. Healtheon was running for president. The IPO was election day.

All the way back to the founding of the country. Early-stage innovation in most industries would not have been possible without government support in a variety of ways, and it's especially true in energy. So the notion that we are just going to privatize early-stage innovation is ridiculous. Other countries are outspending us in R&D, and we are going to pay a price.

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.

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.

Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's," as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Allan confined himself to one investment decision: whether to buy shares in a new company when it went public.

Glass-Steagall was an act of the US Congress, but it worked more like an act of God. It cleaved mankind in two. With it, in 1934, American lawmakers had stripped investment banking out from commercial banking. Investment bankers now underwrote securities, such as stocks and bonds. Commercial bankers, like Citibank, took deposits and made loans. The act, in effect, created the investment banking profession, the single most important event in the history of the world, or so I was led to believe.

I didn't recognize but now know to be Liar's Poker.