Quotes About Odds

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.

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 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.

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

People's emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.)

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that's not a bad deal.

Although we can predict the course of broad trends, like "there will be more hot days" and "sea levels will go up," we can't with certainty blame climate change for any particular event. For example, when there's a heat wave, we can't say whether it was caused by climate change alone. What we can do, though, is say how much climate change increased the odds of that heat wave happening.

That trip, the odds had been in my favor: I had practiced counting cards and could count well enough at blackjack to give me a slim edge over the casino. The basic premise of card counting is that the player can beat the house when there are more high cards than low cards remaining in the deck. If you increase your bets when more low cards have been dealt and more high cards remain, you'll have an advantage over the dealer. I planned to have an advantage, and I planned to win.

But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

Playing the pick four with an inadequate bankroll is worse than never playing the bet at all.

most racetrack bettors spend far more time thinking about who will win a race than on how to bet a race.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

If we are to live,' Rake went on, 'we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.

If we are to live ... we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.

Of course, we all need angels. I had to have one over my head throughout my life, even right now. The odds of my making it were slim to none. So you have to have an angel. You have to believe.

I realized, statistically, the chances of me getting to the WWE and being very successful were very slim. I always hoped it would happen for me.

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility.