William E. Simon Quotes

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

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.

I mean I'm not smarter than the market, but I can recognize a good tape and a bad tape. I recognize when it's right and when it's wrong and that's what my strength is.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

I did get introduced to the financial markets while I was in college. And I think I learned also how to sort of filter out all of the nonrational, or nonsensible, noise and sort of concentrate on what matters, and that's really what markets are about.

My experience is that very few people have what it takes to be a successful investor, as I discussed in The Arrogance of Stock Picking.

I think a lot of hedge funds get their trades from Wall Street and get their ideas from Wall Street. And I just like to find my own ideas. I'm reading a lot; I read a lot of news. I'm addicted to it. I basically - I follow my nose on news stories.

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

To make money in the markets, you have to think independently and be humble.

It is literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade, than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance.

Zeroing in on the best sectors or the best regions of the world is great, but zeroing in on the very best individual stocks is the key to making truly impressive profits.

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.

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

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

Fundamentals make the market.

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.

I've always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.

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.

I grade my stocks. I'm what they call a quant, one of the geeks of the stock market.

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

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

The hardest trader I've ever run against.

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

I'm a futures man.