A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.

It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.