Quotes About Bets

The problem that people don't understand is that active managers, almost by definition, have to be poorly diversified. Otherwise, they're not really active. They have to make bets. What that means is there's a huge dispersion of outcomes that are totally consistent with just chance. There's no skill involved it. It's just good luck or bad luck.

They didn't seem concerned by the fact that for every "loser" who had bought more house than he could afford, there were twenty folks who had lived within their means but were now suffering the fallout from Wall Street's bad bets.

My dad was a kind of Kimbo Slice-type street fighter. He'd go out in the backyards up and down the Gulf Coast and duke it out. They'd wrap T-shirts around their hands for gloves, and take bets. He was a tremendous body puncher. One shot was usually all it took, so they called him 'One Time.'

I've lost millions. The money's not the problem it's the sanity. You go insane. As soon as the bets on you are like 'what did I do that for?' You search and search for the bet and then you think 'why did I do it?' Then the self-worth comes in and you hate it.

At the top of Charlie Ledley's list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers. After

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's how I lost my mind.

When salaries skyrocket, budgets skyrocket, and then rigor mortis sets in: moviemakers turn out formulaic junk in an effort to hedge their bets.

If there's ever an example of the importance of making bold bets and focusing on what you love, it's Twitter.

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's how I lost my mind.

In investing, we intuitively think we should make a number of small bets. A blockbuster strategy is the opposite. It means making fewer huge investments. But it turns out to be safer.

But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report describes, "By the time the process was complete, a mortgage on a home in south Florida might become part of dozens of securities owned by hundreds of investors—or parts of bets being made by hundreds more.

Is it better to go indie and make bigger profits on each book, or stick with a print publisher's 6%-10% royalties? Since I never could figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'm hedging my bets and working both sides of the street.

Annie's latest book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, focuses on strategies for great decision-making.

If we can validate our scientific bets in the clinic, if we can bring valuable new treatments to patients that need them, that will be our ultimate measure of success.

We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.

Being a fast mover and being decisive—it is very hard to be successful and not have those traits as a founder. Why that is, I'm not perfectly clear on, but I think it is something . . . about the only advantage that start-ups have or the biggest advantage that start-ups have over large companies is agility, speed, willing to make non-consensus, concentrated bets, incredible focus. That's really how you get to beat a big company.

When globalization collides with domestic politics, the smart money bets on politics.

Illusions are a necessary consequence of intelligence. Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. Would we be better off without visual illusions? We would in fact be worse off—like a person who never says anything to avoid making any mistakes. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.