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.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit us [the USA], at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.

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.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation.