“Liar’s Poker” – Michael Lewis

…If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque for tens of millions of dollars you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstake, kicking you feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success you probably believe you deserve everything you get. You take it as a reflection of something grand inside of you, You acquire gravitas, and project it like a cologne…

…Best of all, he gave us a rule of thumb about information in the markets that I later found useful: “Those who say don’t know and those who know don’t say.”

…the bond salesmen…were the leaders in the firm, and they might have provided me with a role model, but their smooth metal surfaces offered nothing to cling to. They expressed no interests outside of selling bonds, and they rarely referred to life outside of Solomon Brothers. Their lives seemed to begin and end on the 41st floor; and I began to wonder if I wasn’t about to enter the twilight zone.

“I don’t do favours. I accumulate debts.” – Ancient Sicilian motto.

… “…a person immediately out of the training programme and in a disgusting larval stage between a trainee and man.”

…I kept blowing people up. I didn’t know anything. I had never managed money. I had never made any real money…Yet I was holding myself out as a great expert of matters of finance. I was telling people what to do with millions of dollars. …the only thing that ever saved me in meeting after meeting in the early days at Solomon was that the people I dealt with knew even less.

…Thinking and sounding like Alexander was the next best thing to being genuinely talented, which I wasn’t. So I listened to the master, and repeated what I heard, like kung fu. It reminded me of learning a foreign language. It all seemed strange at first. Then one day, you catch yourself thinking in the new language. Suddenly words you never realised you knew are at your disposal. Finally you dream in the language.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” – Sun Tzu

…I spent most of my working life investing logical lies like this. Most of the time when the markets move, no one has any idea why. A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker. It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And its amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving the Arabs could ever be refuted. So, if you didn’t know why the dollar was falling you shouted out something about the Arabs. Alexander, of course, had a keen sense of the value of my commentary. He just laughed.

…if social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed at the end of the year.