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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Sometimes
Idiotic
Paying
Optimism
Weird
Habit
Seem
Seems

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Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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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.
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Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.
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They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
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There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.
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Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
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What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
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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 I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.
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The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.
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You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.
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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 market.
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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
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What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.
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My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.
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That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
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Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient, Said Palmer. The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.
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We change for the good so long as good exists around us.
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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 who didn't use it.
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If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
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He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.
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