James Lasdun Quotes

The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

I caught hold of the great bull market in soybeans in 1977. I had no idea what I was doing, incidentally.

The stock market to me was like a video game. When it went off, it was like turning the game off. It wasn't something I'd think about until I'd turn the machine on again.

Trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

Macro-trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance.

Proprietary stock-index arbitrage is but one aspect of program trading. Arbitrage will take place whenever there is an imbalance created in one or more markets that are similar.

I invested in many companies, and I'm happy this one worked. This is capitalism. You invest in stock, it goes up, it goes down. You know, if you don't like capitalism, you don't like making money with stock, move to Cuba or China.

There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market.

Don't bottom fish.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

I love the competitive part of stocks. A lot of fear and greed, that's all it is. All I see is green and red.

The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge.

The institutional investor remains the bigger influence on individual trades simply because the institutional investor has more money to support the order and that will have more of an impact on the stock.

There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.

Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. It can't be done except by liars.

When you trade sometimes you lose.

In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?

Trading demands total concentration and the ability to do several things at once while instantly recalling trading prices from the day, or week, before.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

I set up my own trading center in my Cabot dorm room... with my computer, my fax machine, and my telephone.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.