Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis
Michael Monroe Lewisis an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009. His most recent book, Flash Boys, which looked at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 October 1960
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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.
Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.
the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
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.
The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.
In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.
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.
Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .
At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.
There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.
The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.