“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....” executionleadership
“You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.” mindset
“Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.” execution
“It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.” executionfailuremoney
“Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.” executionleadershipmindset
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” mindset
“Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.” executionmindset
“Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.” executionrisk
“[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” mindset
“[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.” innovationmindset
“From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.” executionleadershiprisk
“My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup...” mindset
“I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.” vision
“A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable...” visionmindset
“There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... [I]t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures people's attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two.” leadership
“I... found a significant advantage in selecting aged traders, using as a selection criterion their cumulative years of experience rather than their absolute success... [O]lder people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it.” leadership
“Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...[O]ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry.” investingproduct
“A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do.” executionleadership
“Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. ...[F]iremen ...who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous...” mindset
“[A]t any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time... the most successful traders are likely to be those fit for the latest cycle.” money
“[T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market.” executioninvestingmindset
“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.” execution
“Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric.” executionleadership
“I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets.” risk
“Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes.” investing
“I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data.” vision
“[W]e read too much into shallow recent history... but not from history in general [which] teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. ...outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson.” executionrisk