Market Traders Quotes & Sayings

The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild - in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best traders are simply slaves to the market's price action — Steve Burns

Everybody gets what they want out of the market — Ed Seykota

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Back in the 1980s, the original stated purpose of the mortgage-backed bond had been to redistribute the risk associated with home mortgage lending. Home mortgage loans could find their way to the bond market investors willing to pay the most for them. The interest rate paid by the homeowner would thus fall. The goal of the innovation, in short, was to make the financial markets more efficient. Now, somehow, the same innovative spirit was being put to the opposite purpose: to hide the risk by complicating it. The market was paying Goldman Sachs bond traders to make the market less efficient. — Michael Lewis

When traders were able to earn a million dollars, of which base pay was $150,000 to $200,000 and the rest was bonus, they would go for it. Now if you're sitting there earning $600,000, you become less risk-seeking. And if you have less risk-seeking, the ability of the market to be incredibly volatile is increased. — Michael Hintze

Why would Acheron care about any of this? (M'Adoc)
Not him, his mother. Remember her? Tall angry blond bitch who seriously spanked her whole family into oblivion over a hangnail? (Deimos) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Having observed his market calls real time over the years, I can say that Jason Perl's application of the DeMark Indicators distinguishes his work from industry peers when it comes to market timing. This book demonstrates how traders can benefit from his insight, using the studies to identify the exhaustion of established trends or the onset of new ones. Whether you're fundamentally or technically inclined, Perl's DeMark Indicators is an invaluable trading resource. — Leon G. Cooperman

Fundamental analysis often works, but it often fails. Technical analysis often works, and then it does not work. Economists speak of economic cycles, but none can be found analytically. Traders speak of market cycles; they too cannot be proven. To top it off, the critics of the EMH have been unable to offer an alternative that takes all the discrepancies into account. In few other areas are theory and practical experience in such little agreement. — Edgar E. Peters

Senior managers at the Royal Bank of Canada were now arguing that the bank should create a Canadian dark pool, route their Canadian customers' stock market orders into it, and then sell to high-frequency traders the right to operate inside the dark pool. Brad thought that it made a lot more sense for RBC simply to expose the new game for what it was, and perhaps establish themselves as the only broker on Wall Street not conspiring to screw investors. "The only card left to play was honesty," as Rob Park put it. — Michael Lewis

We built a market at IEX that does not sell certain types of technology advantages to high-frequency traders, and as a result, the high-frequency traders that didn't rely on buying those advantages trade on IEX. — Brad Katsuyama

It's the sum of many parts which grow to be something great. — Oliver Bierhoff

Before Ruby on Rails, web programming required a lot of verbiage, steps and time.
Now, web designers and software engineers can develop a website
much faster and more simply, enabling them to be more productive
and effective in their work. — Bruce Perens

The best traders I know are also the most humble people I know, coincidence? Or has the market taught them some very valuable lessons? — Steve Burns

Traders today complain of living in fear that chats from a bygone era will be dredged up and used against them. They paint a picture of a world where communications are monitored, compliance officers roam the trading floors and it's hard to make an honest living. Banks have finally got the picture, they claim. Market manipulation on the scale we've seen over the past few years is no longer possible. Time will tell (p. 174). — Gavin Finch

By contrast, all professional traders know full well that the market is a huge mass of people. — Anonymous

They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to trade
other people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality. — Brett Scott

The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion's share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall — Michael Lewis

The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS - orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market - not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders. — Michael Lewis

There is, in short, nothing wrong and everything right with inside trading. If anything, inside traders should be hailed as heroes of the free market instead of being apprehended in chains. But, you say, it is "unfair" for some men to know more than others, and actually to profit by that knowledge. But what kind of a world-view dubs it "unfair" for some men to know more than others? It is the world-view of the egalitarian, who believes that any kind of superiority of one person over another - in ability, or knowledge, or income, or wealth - is somehow "unfair." But men are not ants or bees or robots; each individual is unique and different from others, and ability, talent, and wealth will therefore differ. — Anonymous

I grew up in the East End of London, the youngest of three boys in a Catholic household. Both my parents were market traders and worked seven days a week. — James Herbert

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out. — David Ignatius

Traders can cause short-term volatility. In the long run, the market must revert to a sensible price/earnings multiple. — Ben Stein

They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, this political, magical element became a genuine problem, because it meant that even those actors - the brokers, stock-jobbers, traders - who effectively made the system run had no convincing loyalty to anything, even to the system itself. — David Graeber

Personally I don't think day traders are speculating, because traditional speculation requires some market knowledge. They are, instead, gambling, which doesn't. — Arthur Levitt Jr

A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted. — Anthony Marra

Downloading's the same as what I used to do. I used to tape the charts of the songs I liked [off the radio]. I don't mind it. I hate all these big, silly rock stars who moan. At least they're fuckin' downloading your music, you cunt, and paying attention, know what I mean? You should fuckin' appreciate that, what are you moaning about? You've got fuckin' five big houses, so shut up. — Liam Gallagher

A big Wall Street bank's biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability to survive the ups and downs of a risky business. That meant little when the business wasn't risky and didn't require much capital. High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only — Michael Lewis

Time comes when every man's got to feel something new
when he's got to feel young again, just because he's growing old. Women are just the same. But when we get that way we change our hairdress. Or get a new cook. — Clare Boothe Luce

Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.' Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders ... On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price ... the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that he is about to make good money.
... The truth is that the market doesn't really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone's hopes and fears ... — M.E. Thomas

well-functioning market requires all three types of investors for socially beneficial projects to have access to cheap capital. Value investors allocate capital to its most productive use. Speculators, because they trade frequently, provide the liquidity and trading volume that allows value investors and relative value traders to execute their trades cheaply. They also ensure that information is disseminated quickly. — Michael Pettis