Sublime

John Nash, the game theorist and mathematician who later would be immortalized in Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind.

once walked in at 6 am to find that a Russian client was on a margin call for $10m. I quickly calculated that it would take me 133 years on my current salary to make $10m. By 7 am he had wired the funds over. This was a private trader. I was in awe. Inspired.

One of the great sayings about poker is that “in every game there’s a fish. If you’ve played for 45 minutes and haven’t figured out who the fish is, then it’s you.” The same is certainly true of inefficient market investing.

Over years of investigating sketchy people in the world of finance, I’d developed a rule of thumb: Scammers rarely changed their ways. If I could find evidence that someone had been dishonest in the past, there were good odds that their current venture would turn out to be fraudulent too.

“Before he left Jane Street, he said with a high level of confidence, ‘I could make a billion dollars.’ And I said, ‘You’re not going to make a billion dollars.’ ” ‡

“If you don’t know who you are, Wall Street is an expensive place to find out.” — Adam Smith, The Money Game

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.”