James Surowiecki Quotes

Commodity exchanges have a lot of advantages. One, you are helping transparency. Two, they are not political. It's institutional building. It can survive any environment, in theory.

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.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

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.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

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

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

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

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.

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

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

I'm not short, so I can make a speech and drive the stock down and cover the stock. That's not what I do.

Allowing short selling is allowing people to sell - instead of having to buy the stock and then sell it, which doesn't do much; allow them to sell it, and then buy it. In which case they can express that information and the idea is that you would get more accurate valuation of companies by letting people express both their positive information and their negative information through either long or short selling.

I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

Speculation, in its broadest sense, is not an evil in itself, but the contrary, and relieves public distress far oftener than it creates it.

The markets are efficient over time.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

We had a field day before anyone knew anything about shorting. It was almost a license to steal. Nowadays, it's a license to get hosed.

I'm a futures man.

Gambling is entertainment... Financial markets, what one often refers to as speculation, is really the force by which we move capital to the best and highest use.

I think financial markets only look after their own interests.

Market timing doesn't work. If all the bubbles and all this mispricing really exist, how come so few people see it before it turns out that way?