Steve Eisman Quotes

In the past the analysts were the department you never saw. They were the nerds at school. You went to see the investment bankers and maybe the salesmen but the Chinese walls divided them from the analysts. But new technology and the Internet changed all that.

As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.

My career in academic research has not been involved with active management of securities. I've tried to understand risk-and-return relationships; also the pricing of derivative securities.

You want to be a trader, come be a trader. The door's open. You want to travel six days a week, you want to travel the world, the door's open.

Internally, when we manage portfolios, we figure out what works in large cap, what works in mid cap, what works in small cap. Generally speaking, large cap stocks want earning stability, strong cash flow, margin expansion.

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

The amount of data and analysis available for free is a true example of information explosion has leveled the playing field for individual investors.

In baseball, you can hit 40 home runs on a single-A-league team and never get paid a thing. But in a hedge fund, you get paid on your batting average. So you go to the worst league you can find, where there's the least competition.

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

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

Early in my career, we were just pure bottoms-up stock pickers.

I studied economics and thought I wanted to play with the stock market - my dad was a financial adviser - and I was going to go down that path. I was an intern at Smith Barney.

Entire populations of market strategists, fund managers, and economists are employed to try and intuit for clients which securities to bet on for the best possible return each year - or quarter.

I have a long history of looking at things from an investor's perspective by training and background.

Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let's face it, a hamster with Alzheimer's could make those kind of numbers. It's great work if you can get it.

There's 4,000-plus stocks out there, and sometimes it gets a little confusing. And we like them to start with the portfolio grader, but if they'd like to see how I use the system and pick stocks - we offer that as well.

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'm not a Wall Street expert, but I can read the papers.

Today, I think a CFO needs to be more of an operating CFO: someone who's using the financial data and the data of the company to help drive strategy, the allocation of capital, and the management of risks.

The fundamental work of investment management is filtering. The question is what do you filter.

We monitor close to 50 companies globally that can be potential investment opportunities. I'd like to see DST as a significant global investment company in the Internet arena.

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.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

I have never for a minute felt in was my stock picking abilities. I feel that my stock picking abilities aided- I was able to pick out which are the good stocks in the good market, but I have been blessed with a great market.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.