Financial markets

Barton Biggs - A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.

Brunnermeier, Nagel & Pedersen (2008) - Carry trade investment currencies go up by the stairs and down by the elevator.

Warren Buffett (cited in Omaha World-Herald, 1994) - Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

Warren Buffett (in 2001 Chairman's Letter) - After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Warren Buffett (in 2007 Chairman's Letter) - Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”

Jon Danielsson - In physics the phenomena being measured does not generally change with measurement. In the finance that is not true.

Jon Danielsson - A risk is the unknown unknown rather than the things people expect to be risky.

Rudi Dornbusch - It is not the speed that kills you. It’s the sudden stop.

The Financial Times' Lex column - Investment Bible, Lesson One: whenever universal agreement is reached, the opposite soon follows.

William Peter Hamilton (Newspaper editor, 1867–1929) - Wall Street’s graveyards are filled with men who were right too soon.

Bengt Holmstrom (2015) - People often assume that liquidity requires transparency, but this is a misunderstanding. What is required for liquidity is symmetric information about the payoff of the security that is being traded so that adverse selection does not impair the market. Without symmetric information adverse selection may prevent trade from taking place or in other ways impair the market [Akerlof, 1970].

John Kay - Talk is cheap, but short selling is not. The most ardent advocates of capitalism claim that the market, not the ballot box, is the real democratic forum. (...) Anonymity is often the most effective means of telling truth to power: and sometimes the only one.

John Maynard Keynes - The inevitable never happens. It is the unexpected always.

John Maynard Keynes - It is safer to be a speculator than an investor in the sense that a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

Charles Mackay - Men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

Maggie Mahar - Men resist randomness, markets resist prophecy.

Harry Markopolos (Madoff whistleblower) - [The SEC] roars like a mouse, fights like a flea.

Hyman Minsky - Stability is destabilising.

Raghuram Rajan - [If you look at] the incentive structure of the financial system (...) while we have moved to a compensation structure that penalized obvious risk, risk that you could see and measure, that may have made employees focus on risks that could not be measured. An example of that is “tail risk”, because you can’t measure it until it shows up, and it shows up very infrequently.

Paul Samuelson (1966) - The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions. [See: Do Asset Price Drops Foreshadow Recessions? Bluedorn, Decressin & Terrones, May 2015]

Robert W. Sarnoff (RCA) - Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

George Soros - Financial markets have a very safe way of predicting the future. They cause it.

Traditional - Bears sound clever; bulls make money.

Traditional - Most people make money in their job but lose money on another man's job.

Steve Randy Waldman (Interfluidity Blog) - Modified M. Thatcher: "There is no such thing as 'the market'. There are traders & investment funds, and there are banks. And algorithms."