"... think of [shorting stocks] as getting paid for Schadenfreude."

"... as much as you like a diversified bet, if you have an edge, you have to be willing to bet the house on it."

"Commissions... determine what you are told, what you will know, and how much you can find out. If you do a massive amount of commission business, analysts will return your calls, brokers will work for you, and you will get plenty of ideas to make money, on both a short-term and long-term basis."

"No one wanted to pay anything for the Web even if they would pay thousands for slow hard copy."

"Schwab... had commissioned a study of active traders and many of them said they wouldn't use [thestreet.com] even if we were free. Only 8 percent of the active traders said they would use us if they had to pay."

"We were signing up a hundred people a day on a trial basis for the service, and converting about 5 percent of them to paid subscribers...."

On Barton Biggs: "... the immensely cantankerous and often wrong senior statesman from Morgan Stanley...."

On Jim Grant: "... a studious sort, who penned Grant's Interest Rate Observer, one of those high-priced leaflets that prophesized doom on a biweekly basis ... [an] erudite Cassandra ... wrong-way Grant."

"... no one ever made a dime panicking."

On Herb Greenberg: "... the finest investigative business journalist in the country."

"One of my biggest weaknesses, one of all traders' biggest weaknesses, is an inability to value myself beyond my last trade...."

"Nobody ever lies to you face-to-face, and if they do, it is awfully easy to tell."

"You paid huge money for a Bloomberg terminal, but it was worth every penny, and I know many traders who would prefer to go on vacation with their Bloomberg than with their wife and kids."

"You need to invest money to make a killing just when the fear is highest. But, left to their own devices, that's exactly when clients pull out if they can because of the pain of the potential loss."

"The more certain and insistent and self-assured a manager comes across, the more warning lights should flash in the client's head. The humbling nature of stocks and bonds is the only true precept, and those who have no humility are the first to get their bells rung."

"... the academics [at Long Term Capital Management] have no knowledge of how Wall Street really works and they might have believed they were doing their trades without anyone tagging along ... the way Wall Street works is that high-level traders at sell-side firms like Merrill or CSFB take down any positions they want for their firm's own accounts, mimicking good clients whom they regard as smart money...."

"The tendency to overtrade when you are on top is great, and you have to take extreme measures to avoid doing so."

"All old pros hated the Net. They knew it was a bubble, but they had been shooting against it for two years now and it wouldn't burst."

On Abby Joseph Cohen: "... [a] frumpy, curly-haired nerd."

On Ralph Acampora: "Ralph-I-Can-Make-You-Poorer"

"What a strange process that allowed Knight to turn market orders from an oblivious public to their own personal advantage."

"... Wall Street is more a fashion show, short-term, than an exercise in rational pricing and capital allocation."

"... shorting on overvaluation is a chowderhead's game."

"Jim Rogers... says the trading fiasco that cost the state-run China Aviation Oil Holding $550 million is an omen of tougher times ahead for Chinese companies and their investors. 'I can hardly wait,' he says. 'There will be a hard landing in 2005 and I'm going to buy when that happens. I expect more problems in the Chinese market. There will be more things like this and more bankruptcies, a lot more. The Chinese are first-generation capitalists. It's not as easy as it looks.'"

"U.S. investors have flocked to China. Assets in China-region mutual funds sold in the United States soared to $2.9 billion this year, a fourfold increase in five years, according to the New York-based Lipper, an investment information service owned by Reuters Group of London."