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Customer Quotes by Michael Lewis

72 Customer quotes by Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis describes how some traders use speed to get ahead in the market. He explains that orders can be front‑run, giving an unfair edge to those with faster connections. He also points out that the system often feels like a class divide, where the rich pay for nanoseconds and the rest miss out.

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“Ronan, for his part, couldn’t quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. “It’s a whole industry of bullshit,” he…

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“The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.”

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At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated…

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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the…

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“The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.”

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“Allan confined himself to one investment decision: whether to buy shares in a new company when it went public.”

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the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

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Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

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“American bond traders may have sunk their firms by turning a blind eye to the risks in the subprime bond market, but…

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“Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A…

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Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity…

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The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a…

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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But…

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The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly,…

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“Before Volcker’s speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn’t fancy a gamble in the…

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The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people…

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“In early July, Morgan Stanley received its first wake-up call. It came from Greg Lippmann and his bosses at Deutsche Bank, who,…

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“The gist of Laszlo’s pitch for the equity department was this question: When you turn on your television at six-thirty and Dan…

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The idea that it's smart to allow Wall Street firms, with this "too big to fail" imprimatur, to become hedge funds again…

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“Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry…

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“In early 2013, one of the largest high-frequency traders, Virtu Financial, publicly boasted that in five and a half years of trading…

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“Take a typical three-hundred-million-dollar CMO. It would be divided into three tranches, or slices of a hundred million dollars each. Investors in…

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“It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight,” he wrote. “There are specific identifiers that are…

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“Back in July 2003, he’d written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a…

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“A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on…

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“Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans,…

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“When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default…

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“There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first…

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“The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary.…

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“On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football:…

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“As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared…

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“Imagine, for instance, that someone passed a rule, in the U.S. stock market as it is currently configured, that required every stock…

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“The old order types were simple and straightforward and mainly sensible. The new order types that accompanied the explosion of high-frequency trading…

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“They were less and less able to buy and sell big chunks of stock in a gulp.”

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“Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day?”

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“As the U.S. stock market had grown less comprehensible, it had also become more sensationally erratic.”

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A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on…

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“Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the “originate and sell” model. This proved such a…

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I was really interested in a pretty simple thing: what happens when someone tries to introduce moral considerations into Wall Street, what…

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“The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been:…

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More by Michael Lewis

“Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions…

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“The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.”

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on…

“The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.”

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

Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an…

“No longer were the prices of ordinary mortgage bonds allowed to roam inefficiently, for they were now linked to the CMO market, in much…

“The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?” says one trader still at Salomon. “That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the…

“The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost…

“It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe…

“Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .”

“Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market…