Bruce Kovner Quotes

And then at the end of the day, the most important thing is how good are you at risk control. Ninety-percent of any great trader is going to be the risk control.

I seek as much as I can to mitigate risk.

First if all, never play macho man in the market. Second, never overtrade. My major problem was not the number of points I lost on the trade, but that I was trading far too many contracts relative to the equity in the accounts that I handled.

If I have positions going against me, I get right out; if they are going for me, I keep them Risk control is the most important thing in trading. If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out, because you can always get back in.

Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I'm getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis... I never think about [stop vulnerability], because the point about a technical barrier - and I've studied the technical aspects of the market for a long time - is that the market shouldn't go there if you are right.

Nobody ever lost money taking a profit.

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect yourself as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.

Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally.

The civil service are risk averse.

Diversifying sufficiently among uncorrelated risks can reduce portfolio risk toward zero. But financial engineers should know that's not true of a portfolio of correlated risks.

The things that I've learned is, try to make all the mistakes with your own money and on a small level so that when you are responsible for a partner's money or assets, you've learned, and you don't make bigger mistakes.

Great interests demand great safeguards.

There is no elimination of all risks.

When you trade sometimes you lose.

If you want to avoid all risks, soon you will have no risks to worry about.

I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.

Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.

Soros is the best loss taker I've ever seen. He doesn't care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn't work, he's confident enough about his ability to win on other trades that he can easily walk away from the position.

My philosophy, in a nutshell, is to wipe out the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of money.

Our risk systems and processes - we keep investing and improving them.

The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.

When something looks really risky from the outside, what people are doing on the inside - they're not professional risk takers. But they're probably professional risk mitigators.

I'm not really much of a risk taker.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.