Engineer, tough tennis player, avid reader, and entrepreneur: when I have some money I buy great businesses at attractive prices. Profile photo: me and Newton!
“One of the surprises I found in doing the Market Wizards books was how many of these spectacularly successful traders started with failure. Stories of wipeouts, or even multiple wipeouts, we’re not uncommon.” 
“In the stock market, investors have spent much of the last decade bidding up technology giants to levels that make sense only if these firms face limited competition and amazing profitability for decades.” 
“We are all forecasters.” 
“The argument of this book is that we are indeed living through a time of unusually fast change - and this change is being brought about by sudden technological advances… they are developing at an exponential pace, getting faster and faster with each passing month.” 
“Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy; as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately are afflicted by both bias and noise.” 
Three flaws “They can’t get the idea that, empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.” 
“What does the future hold for countries whose fertility has fallen below the replacement level?... Once they slip below 1.5 such reversal appears increasingly unlikely... Gradual population decline seems to be the future of Japan and of many European countries.” 
“Zuckerberg has built feedback into Facebook’s very fiber. Major meetings end with requests for it. Posters around Facebook’s offices say FEEDBACK IS A GIFT. And nobody in the company is above it, not even Zuckerberg himself.” 
“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.” —John Ruskin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
“Identifying the culture you want is hard: you have to figure out not only where your company is trying to go, but the road it should take to get there... Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever... The target is always moving.” 
RORY’S RULES OF ALCHEMY: 
“Early on, Simons made a decision to dig through mountains of data, employ advanced mathematics, and develop cutting-edge computer models, while others were still relying on intuition, instinct, and old-fashioned research for their own predictions.” 
“I have come to see aging as a disease - the most common disease - one that not only can but should be aggressively treated.” 
