Nicolas Berggruen Quotes

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.

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.

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

When you look at a commodities market you need hedgers and speculators. If you don't have one, you don't have a market. That's how it works.

When they are employed wisely, derivatives make the world simpler because they give their buyers an ability to manage and transfer risk.

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.

But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.

You can't look at the intrinsic value of gold as you can a business. Gold doesn't give you cash flow, and, at the end of the day, cash flow is what is important. Gold doesn't give you dividends.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

The United States has the best, deepest, widest, and most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That is a good thing.

Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics.

What Wall Street is, they're market makers. Wall Street's business model is making money on velocity of money. They're a click industry. That's what Wall Street is. They make a lot of money when there's a lot of turnover. And they make a lot of money when that velocity is fast.

I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.

Free markets work better when information is available.

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

Everyone failed to appreciate that our sophisticated, hypermodern, highly hedged, derivative-based financial system—how ultimately fragile it really was.

The markets are efficient over time.

I'm a futures man.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.

Auctions create greater price discovery and liquidity, resulting in a very meaningful final auction price. If you were building a securities exchange today, an auction would be a core feature.