Michael Lewis (author) quotes - page 2

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest. (Michael Lewis (author))
The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only when they had an edge. That's why they were able to trade for five years without losing money on a single day. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U. S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
You see, I'm the event. I am the news. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS-orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U. S. market-not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
For geniuses, they are really dumb,” she said. "Some of them are really pampered: They can't even put together a cardboard box. They don't think you do something. They think you call somebody. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book. (Michael Lewis (author))
If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
the more he studied Buffet, the less he thought he could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffet was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seem delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be? View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
Why, between the dark pools and the public exchanges, were there nearly sixty different places, most of them in New Jersey, where you could buy any listed stock? Why did the public exchanges fiddle with their own pricing so often-and why did you get paid by one exchange to do exactly the same thing for which another exchange might charge you? View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
He now suspected that every human being who knew how high-frequency traders made money was making too much money doing it to stop and explain what was going on. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
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 a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world's most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art. (Michael Lewis (author))
The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn't know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
The SEC staffer argued that it was unfair that high-frequency traders couldn't post phony bids and offers on the exchanges to extract information from actual investors without running the risk of having to stand by them. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)
"Liquidity" was one of those words Wall Street people threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease. View quote
Michael Lewis (author)