Arthur Levitt Quotes

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware.

An idea can be as flawless as can be, but its execution will always be full of mistakes.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

Commodity exchanges have a lot of advantages. One, you are helping transparency. Two, they are not political. It's institutional building. It can survive any environment, in theory.

A great idea is not enough.

Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.

I always love that phrase, 'Oh, this is a good idea, but it's execution dependent.' As if anything in life is not execution dependent. Breathing is execution-dependent.

You take the noise and put it in data information knowledge, and you get insight from that knowledge. How to execute the trade, the timing, sizing, long, short, and then you risk manage it.

Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

We built a market at IEX that does not sell certain types of technology advantages to high-frequency traders, and as a result, the high-frequency traders that didn't rely on buying those advantages trade on IEX.

On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

As everyone knows, Voter News Service, a consortium with a good track record, gave out bad numbers that night. In the closest race in history the wheels apparently came off a rattle trap computer system which we relied on and paid millions for. Through our self-examination and investigation we have determined that there was no intentional political favoritism in play on election night on the part of Fox News.

The best ideas are useless unless carried out.

When the lever is pulled, the body twists and shudders violently, cooks and sizzles obscenely, and emits horrible noises from the nose, mouth and anus…Chapman said it was the ghastliest mode of death he could have conjured, short of slow torture, and that no sane person who witnessed it could possibly oppose its replacement by a less violent means of execution.

Maybe bitcoin is a kind of a bubble. I don't like it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm kind of an old dog to be absorbing that kind of a new trick.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

It's important to have a sound idea, but the really important thing is the implementation.

We have to address impediments that stall implementation of projects and streamline the process to ensure smooth execution going forward. We need to address the leverage levels among corporates to restart investment cycle.

In financial services, the front end of the world operates at super-high speeds: comparative advantages are measured in fractions of nanoseconds. And yet back end processes - the amount of time you have to wait when you sell a stock before cash hits your account - can take days.

StockX's live marketplace will harness the Internet's natural ability to facilitate a better way to transact certain segments of ecommerce. We are going to bring the kind of trading platform and visibility to tangible products that financial and commodities markets have used for decades.

'Debug' is '2001' from Hal's perspective.

Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.