Edward Thorp

“When I shifted my focus from beating gambling games to analyzing the stock market, I naively thought that I was leaving a world where cheating at cards was then problematic and entering an arena where regulation and the rule of law gave investors a fair playing field. Instead, I learned that bigger stakes attracted bigger thieves.”

“Hoaxes, frauds, manias, and other large-scale financial irrationalities have been with us from the beginnings of the markets in the seventeenth century, long before the Internet.”

“I find that retirement savings is individual specific. There’s not one cookie-cutter answer for everybody.”

“I think that we only get estimates of the distributions and that we can only be somewhat sure of the estimates. That makes the problems in the financial world much more difficult, I think, because you have these uncertainties in the distributions.”

“Gambling is a tax on ignorance. People often gamble because they think they can win, they’re lucky, they have hunches, that sort of thing, whereas in fact, they’re going to be remorselessly ground down over time.”

“There are inefficiencies in the market, but they’re not easy to demonstrate, and I think that needs to be done before one shifts money in that direction.”

“Shortsighted things that people sometimes do for their individual self-interest don’t tend to work out well in the long run.”

“Casino gambling with a system where you have the edge is a wonderful teacher for elementary money management.”