“There’s a 70% chance the whole thing will fail,” said Jeff Bezos when pitching his parents for a $100,000 investment in his startup, Amazon (AMZN) in 1994.
“If you look at newspaper headlines every day for the past 50 years, they’re almost always negative. If you look at the economy every day for the past 50 years it’s always positive,” said Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett.
"The level of fact available from news services is way less than it once was," said Roger McNamee, co-founder of venture capital fund Elevation Partners.
“Every recession sows the seeds for the next business recovery, and every recovery sows the seeds of the next recession,” said hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors.
“I used to tell lies. But I’ve given it up, because the field has become overrun with amateurs,” said the great American 19th century humorist, Mark Twain.
"Whenever I hear someone in finance say that a one in two-billion-year event just happened, I say that you just demonstrated you have a model for measuring tail risk that isn't any good," said former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers.
“The entire market is trading like a biotech stock,” said Steve Weiss, a portfolio manager.
"If you work forever, you can live forever," said my friend and mentor, Blackstone's Byron Wien.
"Everything is expensive now. Worries about the future can cause safe assets to become highly priced ... I call it the 'Titanic Effect.' When the Titanic was going down, people would pay a fortune for anything that floats. We may be in a Titanic situation now," said my buddy, Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller.
“I was shocked to see how predictable people were,” said Andreas Weigend, Amazon’s Chief Data Analyst.