Vivek Wadhwa Quotes

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

You want to know the way to raise money? Put a transaction fee on Wall Street, so maybe we can curb some of the speculation and raise some money.

Everything that happens on Wall Street only fortifies my opinion that there is in fact a more ludicrous industry than the entertainment industry.

I think that the failures of Enron and WorldCom and other companies are partially failures of investors to recognize companies that are selling for a thousand times nothing, but chances are they may be worth only that.

Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

The enthusiasm for Tesla and other bubble-basket stocks is reminiscent of the March 2000 dot-com bubble. As was the case then, the bulls rejected conventional valuation methods for a handful of stocks that seemingly could only go up. While we don't know exactly when the bubble will pop, it eventually will.

For every Tesla or Uber, there's a Valeant Pharmaceuticals or Theranos - two story stocks that seduced an astounding array of prominent investors and supporters based on stories that did turn out to be too good to be true.

As so often happened during the dot-com bubble days, the revenues that AOL and PurchasePro were counting on did not materialize. And instead of confronting that harsh reality, AOL and PurchasePro cooked up a scheme to inflate PurchasePro's revenues.

Bubbles are created when something positive is happening. People get over-enthusiastic about it and take the tide higher than it should go. The reality is bubbles are required to create an industry.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

I think what's happened is that the general public has become much more aware of the destructive power of Wall Street.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

A hyperactive stock market is the pickpocket of enterprise.

An IPO is like a negotiated transaction - the seller chooses when to come public - and it's unlikely to be a time that's favourable to you.

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

Tech stocks were the cubic zirconium of the market. They looked good and were sexy, but they just were a way for the company selling them to make money. That's always going to be transient in terms of the stock market. What's real is that companies have to compete. Technology used well is a great tool to enable that if only because most companies dont use technologies well.

Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

The longer I operated on Wall Street the more distrustful I became of tips and inside information of every kind. Given time, I believe that inside information can break the Bank of England

The stock market's handling of new technology is kind of a joke. We have seen CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg, and the like turn into home-shopping networks for stocks. Fund managers and analysts go on TV and sell what's shiny and easy to sell.

Goldman Sachs now has the biggest oil position in America and probably one of the biggest oil positions in the world. They're long oil. So the banks have aggressively been buying oil on their balance sheets. I think they might see this as a way to bail themselves out of this mortgage crisis.