Quotes About Strategy

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.

Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So

The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.

Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn't about to accept this one.

The astute investor Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.

At one point he turned to Christie and said, "Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.

What do you tell your mother when she asks you where to put her money?" I asked. "Guns and gold

The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.

They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.

People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don't. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.

Your biggest competitive advantage is that you don't want to fuck me.

The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It's what most people know as a "flea-flicker," but the Redskins call it a "throw back special." Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming

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.

Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.

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.

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away- far, far and away- the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. [Eric Walker]