Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

• Analysts didnt analyze anything. They were slaves to a team of corporate financiers, the men who did the negotiations and paper work.
• The first thing you learn on the trading lfoor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.
• "Economics" satisfied the two most basic needs of investment bankers. First investment bankers wanted practical people, willing to subordinate their educations to their careers. Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treatises with no obvious use, seemed almost designed as a sifting device.
• Studying economics was more a ritual sacrifice.
• Economics was practical. It got people jobs. And it did this because it demonstrated that they were among the most fervent believers in the primacy of economic life.
• what economics students were supposed to know served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.
• Many of my classmates had sacrificed the better part of their formal educations for Wall Street
• Set questions were posed to which set answers were expected. A successful undergraduate investment banking interview sounded like a monastic chant.
• For rich people, they didnt look very happy [the investment bankers]
• Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
• A bond was worth only as much as the person who valued it properly was willing to pay
• Good traders tend to do the unexpected
• They were the same as front-row people all over the world [in a classroom]
• I considered myself an exception of course [everyone does it. Majority thinks they are above average]
• A rule of thumb about information in the markets ...: "Those who say dont know, and those who know dont say
• The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesnt teach us anything
• "I dont do favors. I accumulate debts."
• I spent much of my working life inventing logical lies like this. Most of the time when markets move, no one has any idea why.
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