Michael Lewis

Quotes

1. 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.

   p. 263

2. 

   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.

   p. 98

3. 

   The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets – and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life.

   p. 266

4. 

   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.

   p. 69

5. 

   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.

   p. 105

6. 

   A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

   p. 14

7. 

   Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.

   p. 50

8. 

   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.

   p. 35

9. 

   Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

   p. 108

10. 

    Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

    p. 91

11. 

    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.

    p. 116

12. 

    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.

    p. 35