Traders Quotes

Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition (and the discipline of the quarterly report), irreversibly heading toward betterment. The strongest will survive; the weakest will become extinct. As to investors and traders, they believe that by letting them compete, the best will prosper and the worst will go learn a new craft (like pumping gas or, sometimes, dentistry). Things are not as simple as that. We will ignore the basic misuse of Darwinian ideas in the fact that organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature - Darwinian ideas are about reproductive fitness, not about survival. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?"
"Notoriously not. Pioneers never are. ~ Isaac Asimov

As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain ... goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth? ~ Adam Hochschild

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 per cent of the time, they would make a lot more money. ~ Bill Lipschutz

We believe we can train any intelligent, quick thinking person to be a trader. We feel traders are made, not born. ~ Jeff Yass

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

I know their game. First, the traders and the missionaries: then the ambassadors: then the cannon. It's better to go straight to the cannon. ~ Tewodros II

There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market. ~ Paul Tudor Jones

I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices - but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it. ~ Nassem Nicholas Taleb

Fair value and change are therefore two sides of the same coin; the more ways in which a security can lose value from a future market move, the less it should rationally be worth today, and hence the mantra: more risk, more return. This difference between the quant's view of value as an average versus the trader's need to worry about any change makes this kind of professional cross-communication difficult. Tour ~ Emanuel Derman

You listen to the street traders any morning. They don't shout, 'Nearly-fresh oranges, only slightly squashy, reasonable value,' do they? No, they shout, 'Git chore orinjes, they're luvverly.' Good business sense." He ~ Terry Pratchett

There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders. ~ Robert Toombs

Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities. ~ Marina Warner

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. ~ George Gilder

There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler's Nintendo console, a selection of laptops. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange. There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome. Traders brought things for Clark sometimes, objects of no real value that they knew he would like: magazines and newspapers, a stamp collection, coins. There were the passports or the driver's licenses or sometimes the credit cards of people who had lived at the airport and then died. Clark kept impeccable records. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I thought if we could put our hard-working culture as traders into the asset management, it will be a great combination, and we did do that. ~ Ivan Glasenberg

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

To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown. ~ Jane Avrich

Win, loss whatever emerges in the short-term, place and manage your next trades untouched, unattached... always keeping your eyes on the long-term picture. ~ Yvan Byeajee

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

Fear, inherently, is not meant to limit you. Fear is the brain's way of saying that there is something important for you to overcome. ~ Yvan Byeajee

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

All the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America." "How?" Almanzo asked. "Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Some traders still think that a computer could not trade as well as they can. ~ Thomas Peterffy

The Occupy Wall Street movement faltered when activists realized that traders were quite busy already. ~ The Covert Comic

Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. ~ Daniel Kahneman

You can still sit under the tree where Dr. Livingstone negotiated with slave traders to set people free. ~ Joyce Banda

The mind is a fascinating instrument that can make or break you. ~ Yvan Byeajee

So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I am an optimist about the UK. We have been involved in trade with our European partners, which we will always be doing whatever this relationship is. We are a member of the EU. That gives us benefits. But we have to figure out where that is going. In the world, we are a global trader already. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

The markets are always changing, and the successful trader needs to adapt to these changes. ~ Michael Steinhardt

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures. Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance. "To be a Levantine," wrote Hourani, "is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either." In ~ Thomas L. Friedman

People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses. ~ Daniel Kahneman

You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story. ~ Paul Tudor Jones

Senegal had always boasted one of Africa's most vibrant merchant cultures. The country's boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar's traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From ~ Howard W. French

Regulators in Britain, America and Switzerland fined six banks - HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup - a total of $4.3 billion for manipulating foreign exchange markets. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said that traders at the banks had colluded to rig important benchmark exchange rates between 2008 and 2013. ~ Anonymous

I haven't seen much correlation between good trading and intelligence. Some outstanding traders are quite intelligent, but a few aren't. Many outstanding intelligent people are horrible traders. Average intelligence is enough. Beyond that, emotional makeup is more important. ~ William Eckhardt

Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads. ~ Michael Lewis

Some of the best trades come when everyone gets very panicky. The crowd can often act very stupidly in the markets. You can picture price fluctuations around an equilibrium level as a rubber band being stretched
if it gets pulled too far, eventually it will snap back. As a short-term trader, I try to wait until the rubber band is stretched to its extreme point. ~ Linda Bradford Raschke

They had become a nation of traders. ~ Petina Gappah

This figuring-out step is crucial, since overly optimistic economic models have often assumed that demand and incentives are enough to stimulate the production of any product. Incentives work to motivate intermediaries and traders, but makers, who are the ones that provide the substance of what is traded, need more than an incentive to make something. They need to know how to do it. ~ Cesar Hidalgo

All statistics have outliers. Money management, therefore, is key to the process of good trading. ~ Yvan Byeajee

The snakes are always against the prohibition of the poisons; and the arms traders, of the arms! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks - they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco da Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It's a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At any rate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the man in the hand.

He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it.

("Pollock And The Porroh Man") ~ H.G. Wells

There were slave traders, Nazis, and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites. ~ Dennis Prager

As developing countries became bigger traders, it was clear that the old way of doing business wouldn't fly. To get them back to the bargaining table, the wealthy countries had to offer something more: a new round of talks that would use trade as a tool to help developing countries grow. ~ Daniel Altman

There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. ~ Jesse Livermore

The biggest secret that traders don't want the world to know is that anyone with a more or less sane disposition can do what they're doing. The trick is getting access to the trough, to the P&L, to the "book." The road toward it is tough, treacherous and crowded. On the way there, you will be misled into believing that in order to be a trader you must have a physics PhD, or know how to write code and build models, or have a top-school MBA, or, when all else fails, just be a young Caucasian male. But in the end, it doesn't matter who made it to the top. In the end, it all comes down to merely placing a bet. ~ Katya G. Cohen

I have always been an honest trader. I come from a school of traders where there was honour in the deal. No contracts, just a handshake and that's it, done. That's the way I prefer to do business but it's not always possible these days, sadly. ~ Alan Sugar

We can have traders, without them being traitors.

We can trade, without trading others.

We can trade our traits, and not our worst ones, with others.

We can trade our traitors for better traders, or they can become better traders themselves.

Let the market trade this way. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau

A successful trader is rational, analytical, able to control emotions, practical, and profit oriented. ~ Monroe Trout

The sophisticates of Java, the traders of Sumatra, the peasants from the outer islands found no common ground. During siesta time from one to five, the Islamic group met separately, the Nationalist group met separately, the Federalist and Unitarians met separately. ~ Sukarno

Investors look at economic fundamentals; traders look at each other; 'quants' look at the data. Dealing on the basis of historic price series was once described as technical analysis, or chartism (and there are chartists still). These savants identify visual patterns in charts of price data, often favouring them with arresting names such as 'head and shoulders' or 'double bottoms'. This is pseudo-scientific bunk, the financial equivalent of astrology. But more sophisticated quantitative methods have since proved profitable for some since the 1970s' creation of derivative markets and the related mathematics. Profitable ~ John Kay

But a further question arises: Is passion different from reason also, or only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent; or rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders, auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason? Yes, he said, there must be a third. Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different from desire, turn out also to be different from reason. But that is easily proved: - We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough. Excellent, ~ Plato

One common adage ... that is completely wrongheaded is: You can't go broke taking profits. That's precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits. ~ William Eckhardt

I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday ... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. ~ H.L. Mencken

Don't ever make the mistake of believing that market success has to come to you fast. Trade small, stay in the game, persist, and eventually, you'll reach a satisfying level of proficiency. ~ Yvan Byeajee

We're talking to every third-party supplier every day of the week, and our traders are talking to them and buying products from them. When we're doing that, we see opportunities which no one else sees. ~ Ivan Glasenberg

What is this strange touch?"
With a start, Jesse realized that Rides the Wind had awakened. He lay watching her closely.Feeling shy she pulled the buffalo robe up under her chin, answering softly, "My people say 'kiss.'"
"And who gives this 'kiss'?"
"Parents to children, husband to wife."
"Show me." As he said it he leaned toward her. Jesse obediently placed a kiss upon the wind-hardened cheek.
He kept his face near hers and the dark eyes searched hers.Then a knowing smile curled up the edges of his mouth. "When Marcus Whitman met with Running Bear and the traders,Rides the Wind was there.I saw many things.I saw this touch you call 'kiss' between man and woman.It was not here," he tapped his cheek, "but here." His finger indicated his mouth.
Jesse felt her face flush and wondered if the early morning light revealed her embarrassment. She assented, "Yes,for some it is so."
"Did Jesse King and Homer King touch in this ay?"
Jesse looked hard into the searching eyes.They returned her stare with honest interest. "My people do not speak of these things."
Rides the Wind was quiet for a moment, pondering her response. "If the white man speaks not of what is here," he laid a hand flat upon the tawny chest, "he must be very sad. ~ Stephanie Grace Whitson

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

Traders and Surfers both have to deal with feelings of missing out on the small ones, until the big one comes along. They also have to deal with feelings of staying with the big one. ~ Ed Seykota

Because the Indians are planning to start war now, the common people want all of them destroyed so that they can live in peace; however, this is probably a sinful and not at all decent wish. Not to mention the fact that the Indians were the first and legitimate inhabitants and hence are the rightful owners of this land. . . . If the English traders treated the Indians better, the Indians would behave better. ~ Johann Martin Boltzius

We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion. ~ Michael Crichton

Reaching any goal in trading requires specific domain knowledge and technical skills. But then, after that, it's all mindset management. Yet most people ignore that - they automatically think they have that last part all figured out, and it's a mistake. ~ Yvan Byeajee

Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. They did the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently,. They were as happy with their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little shooting; but at a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people.

I respect, and even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived. ~ Isaac Asimov

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. ~ Teju Cole

Traders take a good system and destroy it by trying to make it into a perfect system. ~ Robert Prechter

Of course, the fact that a single biblical text can mean many things doesn't mean it can mean anything. Slave traders justified the exploitation of black people by claiming the curse on Noah's son Ham rendered all Africans subhuman. Many Puritans and pioneers appealed to the stories of Joshua's conquest of Canaan to support attacks on indigenous populations. More recently, I've heard Christians shrug off sins committed by American politicians because King David assaulted women too. Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, "out of the land of slavery" (Exodus 20:2). ~ Rachel Held Evans

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

Note, please, that I condemn only junk science (as does Mr Delingpole): this is in fact a measure of my, and his, regard for good science. Junk bonds do not, by their existence, condemn the existence of markets; crony capitalism – which is indissolubly tied to the 'Green' movement and its loudest advocates, who are bought and paid for by cronyism – does not condemn capitalism; junk science does not invalidate science as a discipline. Indeed, the greatest and most implacable enemies of junk bonds are and by rights ought to be traders; of crony capitalism, capitalists; and of junk science, those who hold true science in its just regard. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire; for it is the most underling tradesmen only who make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers. A great trader purchases his good always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind. ~ Adam Smith

If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd. ~ John Templeton

And suddenly he became almost lyric. "For three thousand years the Common Man has been fended off from the full and glorious life he might have had, by Make Believe. For three thousand years in one form or another he has been asking for an unrestricted share in the universal welfare. He has been asking for a fair dividend from civilisation. For all that time, and still it goes on, the advantaged people, the satisfied people, the kings and priests, the owners and traders, the gentlefolk and the leaders he trusted, have been cheating him tacitly or deliberately, out of his proper share and contribution in the common life. Sometimes almost consciously, sometimes subconsciously, cheating themselves about it as well. When he called upon God, they said 'We'll take care of your God for you', and they gave him organised religion. When he calls for Justice, they say 'Everything decently and in order', and give him a nice expensive Law Court beyond his means. When he calls for order and safety too loudly they hit him on the head with a policeman's truncheon. When he sought knowledge, they told him what was good for him. And to protect him from the foreigner, so they said, they got him bombed to hell, trained him to disembowel his fellow common men with bayonets and learn what love of King and Country really means.

"All with the best intentions in the world, mind you.

"Most of these people, I tell you, have acted in perfect good faith. They manage to believe that i ~ H.G. Wells

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

If we didn't execute bankers and rogue traders found guilty of financial mischief, it might give them the clear signal that it's actually okay, and then where would we be? ~ Jasper Fforde

And then at the end of the day, the most important thing is how good are you at risk control. Ninety-percent of any great trader is going to be the risk control. ~ Paul Tudor Jones

The Merchants of Carolina, are fair, frank Traders. ~ John Lawson

Money matters, but not as much as you probably think. ~ Yvan Byeajee

Contrary to the general picture of the decline of Asia and the rise of the West, the Chinese economy was buoyant in the eighteenth century, developing its own local variations and with trade links across Southeast Asia. Silk, porcelain and tea from China continued to be in great demand in Europe (and in the American colonies) even though in 1760 the Chinese confined all Western traders to the port city of Canton. Tribute-paying neighbours as near as Burma, Nepal and Vietnam (and as far away as Java) upheld Beijing's solipsistic view that the Chinese emperor, presiding over the central kingdom of the world, had the right to rule 'all under heaven. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer. ~ Ayn Rand

Professional traders have always had some system or other based upon their experience and governed either by their attitude towards speculation or by their desires. ~ Jesse Lauriston Livermore

From Senegalese chauvinism to Wolof tribalism, there is but one small step. And consequently, wherever the petty-mindedness of the national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable of enlightening the people as a whole or have been unable to put the people first, wherever this national bourgeoisie has proven to be incapable of expanding its vision of the world, there is a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as ethnic tensions triumph. Since the only slogan of the bourgeoisie is "Replace the foreigners," and they rush into every sector to take the law into their own hands and fill the vacancies, the petty traders such as taxi drivers, cake sellers, and shoe shiners follow suit and call for the expulsion of the Dahomeans or, taking tribalism to a new level, demand that the Fulani go back to their bush or back up their mountains. ~ Frantz Fanon

By accident, some traders had stumbled across a route controlled by Verizon that took 14.65 milliseconds. "The Gold Route," the traders called it, because on the occasions you happened to find yourself on it you were the first to exploit the discrepancies between prices in Chicago and prices in New York. ~ Michael Lewis

To be a good trader, you need to trade with your eyes open, recognize real trends and turns, and not waste time or energy on regrets and wishful thinking. ~ Alexander Elder

Winners feel rewarded when price moves in their favor, and losers feel punished when it moves against them. Crowd members remain blissfully unaware that by focusing on price they create their own leader. Traders who feel mesmerized by prices create their own idols. ~ Anonymous

Ernestine Warner was working with the same rough information available to traders like Eisman. This was insane: The arbiter of the value of the bonds lacked access to relevant information about the bonds. "When we asked her why", said Vinny, she said "The issuers won't give it to us". That's when i lost it. "You need to demand to get it!" She looked at us like, We can't do that. We were like, "Who is in charge here? You're the grown-up. You're the cop! Tell them the fucking give it to you!!!" Eisman concluded that "S&P was worried that if they demanded the data from Wall Street, Wall Street would just go to Moody's for their ratings. ~ Michael Lewis

In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits. ~ Isaac Asimov

In the interest rate area, traders have for a long time used a version of what is known as Black's model for European bond options; another version of the same model for caps and floors; and yet another version of the same model for European swap options. ~ John Hull

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian tangles with slave traders who, with statistics and graphs, try to justify their operations as 'economic development.' Caspian wants the trade ended:
'But that would be putting the clock back,' gasped the governor. 'Have you no idea of progress, of development?'
'I have seen both in an egg,' said Caspian. 'We call it "Going Bad" in Narnia. This trade must stop. ~ Joseph Loconte

Traders focus almost entirely on where to enter a trade. In reality, the entry size is often more important than the entry price ~ Jack D. Schwager

Trading effectively is about assessing probabilities, not certainties. ~ Yvan Byeajee

The stock exchange is a gambling club in which the house members (pros, institutional traders, the State) take advantage of the public's greed in order to profit from their mistakes. ~ Meir Barak

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes. ~ Sara Sheridan

In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British. ~ Allan W. Eckert

This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts. ~ Michael Lewis

My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. They are taking 5 to 10 percent risks on a trade when they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks. The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can't trade. ~ Bruce Kovner

In the Ottoman Empire,' she began, 'the camel traders have stopping places along their trade routes called caravanserai. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles apart, over desert or mountain range, but they travel safe in the knowledge that there will be a place where they can shelter and find succour at the end of their journey. Even if they have never been that way before, they are sure that there will be such a place; that sooner or later, they will find a caravanserai.' Annibale sat forward, interested. ' How do they know?' 'They do not know. They have faith. 'He sat back again. 'I think Annibale did too. That is why my mother named me so.' She could see that it cost him to talk of her. 'She liked the story. She said no one could know what lay beyond today, but you had to hope, and be brave, and trust that all would be well. ~ Marina Fiorato