Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Remember that all financial markets are filled with good but not necessarily innocent people looking after their own self-interests before they look after yours.

Do we have to regulate derivatives? Yes, we do. 'Cause when I did this in my investments, frankly, no one knew who could pay who. But derivatives have an important place in our economy.

If you were approaching the TARP investments from a pure investment standpoint, then there's no doubt in my mind the taxpayer lost, and probably lost big.

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.

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.

Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

What I invest in, while not risky for me, may be too risky for most people.

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

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.

Fanny Mae was torn between its two duties: to make as much money as they could and to protect the mortgage market.

Don't act like a bank unless you are a bank. That was a really big lesson learned from 2008.

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out.

I don't want to create a too-big-to-fail player.

The financial crisis of 2008-09 was in large part the result of the so-called 'success' of people who did not understand their fiduciary duty. This kind of 'success' is extremely harmful to all of society.

No one would suggest completely ignoring news about your investments. Enron investors, for example, would have been well served to sell once early reports of accounting irregularities surfaced. But the key is to keep news in context and act only if further reflection or study indicates that the core thesis for an investment has changed.

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

I don't think you should invest in commodities. Eddie Murphy made it seem risky in Trading Places.

Using volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return.

Owning stocks is like having children - don't get involved with more than you can handle.

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.