Quotes About Opportunity

Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned.

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young.

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

If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least.

The more egregious the rating agencies' mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In

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.

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.

How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

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

I always thought that the biggest opportunity on the Internet was the vertical markets," Clark continued. "I didn't know anything about health care, but I was looking for something worth doing and…

If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn't help themselves, he would have said, "My parents had to start all over again. What's the big deal? Just suck it up." The sight of little kids post-Katrina jolted him. "It kind of blew my mind—if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.

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.

He'd detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments.

Although Steve's skill with computers had been his ticket out of Leeds to Silicon Valley, he regarded the machine as, at best, an unsteady ally: it was always laying traps for the programmer.

It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn't done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have.

The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility.

One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you.

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.

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

Michael Lewis

Clark's new enterprises: endure the humiliation of not fully understanding your job, and you might never need to work again.

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.