Michael Lewis 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.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

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.

There is something in people; you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

I don't try to get all the meat off the bone. When I get a good figure, I just move something. Too many people try to hit the peak price, and they hold on until it is too late.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

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

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.

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

Don't bottom fish.

American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it's profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It's just about sucking everything up.

Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.

The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.

Markets love volatility.

Markets don't allow you to hang about.

When you trade sometimes you lose.

To control the American market is to own America.

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

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.

Soros has taught me that when you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig. It takes courage to ride a profit with huge leverage.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

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