Howard Lutnick Quotes

I decided I was going to go to Wall Street, and I was introduced to some people... I met a guy who knew a bond trader at Pressprich, and he got me to meet him and the guy that ran their sales department, Jack Collin.

And at a relatively early age, ten or so, I invested my first share of stock. And I used to follow, look at companies and so forth. But throughout the whole period, and indeed right through my college years, while I was involved in the stock market, always interested in finance, I never thought of it as a full-time job.

I didn't fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major; most everyone else had relatives or family in banking.

I loved working on Wall Street. I loved the meritocracy of it and the camaraderie of the trading floor.

In India, the investment banking industry is a little different. Overseas, the structures are very complicated, but not in India.

My father was an investment banker, a stock broker.

In banking, it was my responsibility to deliver investment opportunities and solutions to hedge fund clients, and at Bloomberg, it's my job to break down news that matters to our viewers and readers.

I'm primarily just an investor.

I have become a subscriber for 'Business Week.' It teaches me a lot about business, and I have really started to get into it. I'm interested in business and learning about how everything works.

You can no longer buy commodities at Merrill Lynch. My guess is many analysts and even executives are too young to know how profitable a hot commodities market can be. They will soon.

I didn't become interested in derivatives until 1982, 1983.

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

I left Goldman Sachs. I was thinking about going to another Wall Street place. I didn't want to do that. That was crazy. After you work on Wall Street, it's a choice: would you rather work at McDonald's or on the sell side? I would choose McDonald's over the sell side.

The marginal people on the trading desks, there's no skill set. If they don't trade derivatives, I don't know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.

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

During my undergraduate training at UCLA, I was studying finance and securities; my particular interest was with mutual funds. Wanting to get into a high position at some of the companies that were doing that, I knew that law would be useful.

I've always wanted to invest. That's why I started working on Wall Street in the first place, back in 1986 when I went through the Salomon Brothers training program.

Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.

Bankers are doing God’s Work!

Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the [financial] industry came a rise in all kinds [of debt], both public and private.

Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators - that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas - that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.

When you hear of somebody named Goldberg, you think of a guy sitting behind a desk investing your money.