"In the last twenty years, there has been a lot of progress made in measuring risk for investment portfolios. Why don't you employ these scientific quantitative methods? Because we don't believe in them. They're generally constructed on the assumption of efficient market theory. That theory is in con"
"On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others. But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving. I couldn't recognize my mistakes if I couldn't forgive myself. To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a so"
"According to my theory of initially self-reinforcing, but eventually self-defeating trends, the trend is your friend most of the way; trend followers only get hurt at inflection points, where the trend changes. Most of the time I am a trend follower, but all the time I am aware that I am a member of"
"More generally, running an investment portfolio is not work in the ordinary sense of the word. It is something else. It is risk taking. The amount of work you need to do is inversely related to your success. That is to say, if you are working at what is normally considered work, if you are a salesma"
"We both started with the postulate that the markets are always wrong. Actually the big difference between Jim Rogers and me was that Jim thought that the prevailing view was always wrong, whereas I thought that we may be wrong also. Wall Street wisdom was, by definition, conventional wisdom, and sin"
"Then there was the Real Estate Investment Trust industry (REITs), which I put on the map. We got it right coming and going. I issued a study in which I described it as an initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating process that would end badly with most REITs going bust. But the end was"
"This was, I think, the Wednesday before Black Monday. That's when I should have been in the office and getting the hell out of the market, but I missed it. I could see trouble coming, but I thought it would come first in Japan, where a financial bubble was developing, so I was short Japan and long t"
"I also use it to describe specific instances where the two-way feedback mechanism disrupts both the course of events and the participants' perceptions in a way that gives rise to a disequilibrium."