Downside Risk Quotes

Credit-default swaps remedied the problem of open-ended risk for me. If I bought a credit-default swap, my downside was defined and certain, and the upside was many multiples of it.

Politicians worry about downside political risks. Generally speaking, they are risk minimizers.

When you're at the top, there's only one way to go.

I think one can easily make a case for taking out Saddam Hussein. In fact, one could probably be made on humanitarian grounds alone. But just as there's a downside risk to doing nothing about this man, there is a very serious downside risk to invading the country.

It is way less certain to be a wonderful business in the future. The threat is alternative mediums of information. Every newspaper is scrambling to parlay their existing advantage into dominance on the Internet. But it is way less sure [that this will occur] than the certainty 20 years ago that the basic business would grow steadily, so there's more downside risk. The perfectly fabulous economics of this business could become grievously impaired.

The downside risk for a President in international affairs is always greater than the upside gain.

I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

In many ways, however, inheriting success is as difficult as taking over at a time of crisis. The latter requires the leader to extricate the nation from its turmoil. While succeeding in such a situation is not easy, you begin at a lower base with a lot of upside. In my situation, the upside is not so obvious, but the downside is patently clear.

Shareholders share in the downside and not necessarily in the upside; that's the whole story.