Quotes About Market

The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side—the entire financial system, essentially—had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What's strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.

best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor." The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side—the entire financial system, essentially—had gambled with the odds against them.

The presence of millions of small investors had politicized the stock market. It had been legislated and regulated to at least seem fair.

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation.

Send me a list of the 2006 deals with high no-doc loans." Eisman, predisposed to suspect fraud in the market, wanted to bet against Americans who had been lent money without having been required to show evidence of income or employment. "I figured Lippmann was going to send me deals that had twenty percent no docs. He sent us a list and none of them had less than fifty percent.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money.

2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Half a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage–backed bonds in a single year.

The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.

He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud.

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.

An investor who went from the stock market to the bond market was like a small, furry creature raised on an island without predators removed to a pit full of pythons.

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.

Greg Lippmann was now blasting Vinny and Danny with all sorts of negative information about the housing market, and, for the first time, Vinny and Danny began to hide the information from Eisman. "We were worried he'd come out of his office and shout, 'Do a trillion!'" said Danny. In

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.

Just after Netscape I was interested in a vertical market," he began, deploying the usual Internet lingo. A vertical market was a market for a single good or service, like books or travel. A horizontal market was a market that cut across many different goods and services, like a Web browser.

Charles Kindleberger's 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes.

Brad's desk to the BATS exchange in Weehawken, was about 2 milliseconds, and the slowest, from Brad's desk to Carteret, was around 4 milliseconds. In practice, the times could vary much more than that, depending on network traffic, static, and glitches in the pieces of equipment between any two points. It took 100 milliseconds to blink your eyes; it was hard to believe that a fraction of the blink of an eye could have such vast market consequences.

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.

These Ginnie Maes suck. They get longer [in maturity] when rates go up, and shorter when rates go down, and nobody wants them

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

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