Although Danny was clearly a master of the game, making money was not an end in itself for him. I think that is true of many successful people in finance. Apart from giving money away, they have passionate outside interests.

The message is that mood or investor psychology is as important to markets as is information. It requires tremendous discipline to apply this understanding to one’s behavior.

All we can ever do is look at the past to predict the future, but life is dynamic and constantly changing, so the assumptions governing predictions are bound to be wrong.

mistake in launching the Oppenheimer Fund was in not sufficiently appreciating how skepticism about the unfamiliar can obscure the merits of even the best ideas.

The mid-1970s were not a productive time for the markets, which stagnated between 1964 and 1982; the Dow closed at 874 in 1964 and at 875 in 1981, racking up a magnificent gain of one point in seventeen years. Anybody who began investing in the 1990s, and had the expectation that stocks regularly outperform all other investments, should spend a

Investors are very good at recognizing the moods of the past—for example, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Swinging Sixties—but we tend to be oblivious to the mood of the present. When do we notice that the world has changed? Sometimes change arrives with a bang. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima instantly and permanently

But if entire nations can be seized by manias—recall Germany in the 1930s—why should we assume that people will always behave rationally when they invest their money?

One truth of archaeology in particular bears directly on my thinking. Archaeologists have their specialties, and one of the curiosities of the field is that those who specialize in one aspect of antiquity tend to be blind to anything else. Archaeologists who look for pottery sherds will not see coins, and, conversely, those who look for coins will

I have thought about the myriad ways in which money flows toward tax incentives and away from high taxes and have concluded that taxes play a profound role in shaping history. Give officials control of the tax code and they can change society, either deliberately through the wise use of incentives or, more commonly, inadvertently through a