T. Boone Pickens 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.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

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

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

I didn't become interested in derivatives until 1982, 1983.

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.

Derivatives are a huge, complex issue.

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

Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the [financial] industry came a rise in all kinds [of debt], both public and private.

One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they're auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.

In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.

I play with leverage.

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.

The idea that big buyside firms are going to come in and trade mano-a-mano with high-frequency trading firms shows a lack of knowledge of the business.

I used to do a lot of the day trading and the stocks. I used to have the Ameritrade and trade options.

The options and futures traded on exchanges are derivatives contracts.

Auctions create greater price discovery and liquidity, resulting in a very meaningful final auction price. If you were building a securities exchange today, an auction would be a core feature.

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.

Promoting the interaction of orders remains one of the most difficult, but crucially important, challenges we face concerning our national market system.

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

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

We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China... and it becomes this shell game.

Trillions of dollars every day are being exchanged around the world in all of the financial markets.