Quotes About Market

The SEC, like the public stock exchanges, had a kind of equity stake in the future revenues of high-frequency traders.

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

Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Zoran had no idea whether the market as a whole had finished up or down for the day. Ten minutes after that he could be found, alone, pacing outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. "This is like the first day of the battle against complacency," he said.

If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood by their market, who couldn't be? If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions. And in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

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

After all, the job market is a market.

After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino.

The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses.

Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it.

The options market also tended to presuppose that the distant future would look more like the present than it usually did.

No longer were the prices of ordinary mortgage bonds allowed to roam inefficiently, for they were now linked to the CMO market, in much the same way that flour is linked to the market for bread. Fair value for CMOs (the finished product) implied a fair value for conventional mortgage bonds (the raw materials).

A big Wall Street bank's biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability to survive the ups and downs of a risky business. That meant little when the business wasn't risky and didn't require much capital. High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only

If everyone on Wall Street abided by the rule's spirit, the rule would have established a new fairness in the U.S. stock market.

American bond traders may have sunk their firms by turning a blind eye to the risks in the subprime bond market, but they made a fortune for themselves in the bargain, and have for the most part never been called to account.

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. "No matter what the regulators did, some other intermediary found a way to react, so there would be another form of front-running

A new trader could leap into a market and trade frantically inside it without adding anything of value to it.

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.»

The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market. The reality turned out to be a windfall for financial intermediaries—of somewhere between $10 billion and $22 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you wanted to believe.

They were less and less able to buy and sell big chunks of stock in a gulp.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.

It was widely believed that a small, bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumors to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy.

Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don't like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.