"There's something very reductive about the stock market. You can be right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons, but to the market you're just plain right or wrong ... Guessing right about the market usually leads to chortling." p. 5

"... gauging investors is often as important as gauging investments. And it's likely to be more difficult." p. 7

"... greed and fear were ... doing their usual two-step in my head and, in the process, stepping all over my critical faculties." p. 14

"... psychological illusions and foibles often make us act irrationally in a variety of disparate endeavors, not the least of which is investing." p. 18

"Like corporate accounting, personal accounting can be plastic and convoluted, perhaps even more so since, unlike corporations, we are privately held." p. 25

"Online chatrooms are natural laboratories for the observation of illusions and distortions, although their psychology is more often brutally basic than subtly specious." p. 31

"The quasi-mathematical jargon of technical analysis seldom hangs together as a coherent theory." p. 38

"[Elliott Wave Theory] brings to mind the ancient Ptolemaic system of describing the planets' movements, in which more and more corrections and ad hoc exceptions had to be created to make the system jibe with observation ... For some, of course, what the theory has going for it is the mathematical mysticism associated with the Fibonacci numbers, any two adjacent ones of which are alleged to stand in an aesthetically appealing relation." p. 39

"Optimal strategies can always be found after the fact. The trick is getting something that will work in the future; everyone's good at predicting the past." p. 44

"With blackjack [counting strategies] there is a compelling mathematical explanation for those who care to study it. By contrast an effective technical trading strategy might be found that was beyond the comprehension not only of the people using it but of everyone. It might simply work, at least temporarily." p. 51

"If the movement of stock prices is random or near-random, then the tools of technical analysis are nothing more than comforting blather giving one the illusion of control and the pleasure of specialized jargon. They can prove especially attractive to those who tend to infuse random events with personal significance." p. 57

"[Our] powerful natural proclivity to invest random events with meaning on many different levels makes us vulnerable to people who tell engaging stories about these events. In the Rorschach blot that chance provides us, we often see what we want to see or what is pointed out to us by business prognosticators, distinguishable from carnival psychics only by the size of their fees. Confidence, whether justified or not, is convincing, especially when there aren't many 'facts of the matter.' This may be why market pundits seem so much more certain than, say, sports commentators, who are comparatively frank in acknowledging the huge role of chance." pp. 58-59

"An old adage ... has it that those who understand compound interest are more likely to collect it, those who don't more likely to pay it." p. 86

"Natural selection probably favors organisms that respond to local or near-term events and ignore distant or future ones ... [I]n countless situations people prepare exclusively for near-term outcomes and don't look very far ahead. They myopically discount the future at an absurdly steep rate." pp. 94-95

"[T]he P/E ratio seems to be precise, objective, and quasi-mathematical. But ... the P in the numerator is not invulnerable to psychological factors nor is the E in the denominator invulnerable to accountants' creativity." p. 102

"People often attribute meaning to phenomena governed only by regression to the mean, the mathematical tendency for an extreme value of an at least partially chance-dependent quantity to be followed by a value closer to the average." p. 108

"[T]he [telecom] industry's trajectory over the last decade resembled that of the railroad industry after the Civil War. The opening of the West, governmental inducements, and new technology led the railroads to build thousands of miles of unneeded track. They borrowed heavily, each company attempting to be the dominant player; their revenue couldn't keep pace with the rising debt; and the resulting collapse brought on an economic depression in 1873. Substitute fiber-optic cable for railroad tracks, the opening of global markets with the opening of the West, the Internet for the intercontinental railroad network, and governmental inducements for governmental inducements, and there you have it." p. 113

"Every day accountants must make judgments and determinations that are debatable -- about the way to value inventory, the burdens of pensions and health care, the quantification of goodwill, the cost of warranties, or the classification of expenses -- but once made, these judgments result in numbers, exact to the nearest penny, that seem indubitable." p. 114

"Viewing options as pure bets, gamblers are generally as interested in carefully pricing them as casino-goers are in the payoff ratios of slot machines." p. 123

"Risk in general is frightening, and the fear it engenders explains part of the appeal of quantifying it. Naming bogeymen tends to tame them, and chance is one of the most terrifying bogeyman around, at least for adults." p. 136

"Despite their volatility, stocks as a whole have proven less risky than bonds over the long run because their average rates of return have been considerably higher. Their rates of return have been higher because their prices have been relatively low. And their prices have been relatively low because they've been viewed as risky and people need some inducement to make risky investments ... Viewed as less risky, stocks become risky; viewed as risky, they become less risky. This is yet another instance of the skittish, self-reflective, self-corrective dynamic of the market." pp. 145-146

"People do not ... have a set of fixed preferences on which they coolly and rationally base their economic decisions. The assumption that investors are sensitive only to price and a few ratios simplifies the mathematical models, but it is not always true to our experience of fads, fashions, and people's everyday monkey-see monkey-do behavior." p. 169

"[L]ong range precise prediction of nonlinear systems isn't generally possible. This non-predictability is the result not of randomness but of complexity too great to fathom." p. 174