Market Quotes

“Normally, the easiest way to [use money to get more money, i.e. capitalism] is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites--though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamental selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world--even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“[A mission-oriented economy] means asking what kind of markets we want, rather than what problem in the market needs to be fixed.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Our leaders keep saying phrases like, “Let the market decide.” or “The market will get to the efficient outcome.” Really? The market is a very flawed institution that does not deserve the nearly religious kind of endorsement of it that our leaders are eager to provide over and over again.”
― Richard D. Wolff, The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

“It is a common misconception that if you diversify, you don’t need to learn anything. Just buy a bunch of stocks, and you will be good. Nothing can be further from the truth.”
― Naved Abdali

“it is not a calculated risk if you haven’t calculated it.”
― Naved Abdali

“If your bull case to buy a stock is “a sharp price drop” or "price is going to the moon”, you don’t have a bull case.”
― Naved Abdali

“The prevention of competition is essential to exploitation.”
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“As with other kinds of markets, popular operating systems quickly get more and more popular, as they attract both new buyers and new sellers. In time, they become de facto industry standards—meaning they essentially establish a marketplace in which products (new applications) can be sold. Once this happens, they can, at least for a time, so completely dominate their markets that competing operating systems can’t attract enough users and developers to be anything but niche offerings.”
― Alvin E. Roth, Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

“Markets have strange tendencies to prove you wrong either way.”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!

“The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.”
― Iain M. Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture

“Fortune favors the bold, brave, and strong. If perfect and complete knowledge of a thing is your precondition for action, then the market will have already been filled and you’ll be behind the competition.”
― Evan Thomsen, Don’t Chase The Dream Job, Build It: The unconventional guide to inventing your career and getting any job you want

“Buy the business, not the price.”
― Naved Abdali

“A price drop is not an actual risk. The actual risk is not to know the reason why the price was dropped.”
― Naved Abdali

“Unlike what neo-liberals say, market and democracy clash at a fundamental level. Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote'. The market runs on the principle 'one dollar, one vote'.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

“Here’s the thing: only the market can tell if your idea is good. Everything else is just opinion.”
― Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

“We make the world we live in. Market the world you want by sharing your voice with us.
We are all marketers. We may not want to be marketers, but we are all marketing by default whether we speak up or not.”
― Richie Norton

“When I was nine, Sunrise Market relocated to a larger store. My mom pored giddily over the new imports that came with the expansion: pollack roe frozen in little wooden boxes; packages of Chapagetti instant black-bean noodles; bungeo-ppang, fish-shaped pastry filled with ice cream and sweet red-bean paste, each new item reviving bygone memories of her childhood, conjuring new recipes to capture old tastes.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Blue ocean strategy, by contrast, shows how strategy can shape structure in an organization’s favor to create new market space.”
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

“What often makes matching markets especially challenging is that everyone has to puzzle through not only their own desires but also those of everyone else and how all those other market participants might act to achieve their preferences.”
― Alvin E. Roth

“Each of these ubiquitous marketplaces has found a way to succeed not only in making markets thick, uncongested, and safe, but also in making them simple to use.”
― Alvin E. Roth, Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

“Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.
Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for theunfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“A higher‐probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets. Don't venture too far afield if you don't need to, though. You can expand your capacity to sell while at the same time increasing your addressable market—without trying to strike gold a second time. That's how we continued to grow ServiceNow, which was already a super grower when I joined but still had plenty of room to expand its core offering.”
― Frank Slootman, Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

“Book publishing is like investing and waiting for the stock market to take off, you keep at it in the hope you eventually hit the best seller's list.”
― Steven Magee

“Metaphors are often very useful in elucidating complicated problems and in making them comprehensible to less intelligent minds. But they become misleading and result in nonsense if people forget that every comparison is imperfect. It is silly to take metaphorical idioms literally and to deduce from their interpretation features of the object one wished to make more easily understandable by their use. There is no harm in the economists' description of the operation of the market as automatic and in their custom of speaking of the anonymous forces operating on the market. They could not anticipate that anybody would be so stupid as to take these metaphors literally.

No "automatic" and "anonymous" forces actuate the "mechanism" of the market. The only factors directing the market and determining prices are purposive acts of men. There is no automatism; there are men consciously aiming at ends chosen and deliberately resorting to definite means for the attainment of these ends. There are no mysterious mechanical forces; there is only the will of every individual to satisfy his demand for various goods. There is no anonymity; there are you and I and Bill and Joe and all the rest. And each of us is engaged both in production and consumption. Each contributes his share to the determination of prices.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos

“By adolescence, if not earlier, people are getting feedback about their market value, feedback that shapes their self-esteem and thus affects how high they aim their sights.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“The social activity of
commodities on the market is to capitalist society what collective
intelligence is to a socialist society.”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development

“In fact, this can happen only when the conditions for commodity
production and exchange are equal for all members of society; that is to
say, when they are all independent owners of their means of production
who use these means to fabricate the product and exchange it on the
market. This is the most elementary relationship, and constitutes the
starting point for a theoretical analysis. Only on this basis can later
modifications be understood; but they must always satisfy the condition
that, whatever the nature of an individual exchange may be, the sum of
exchange acts must clear the market of the total product. Any
modification can be induced only by a change in the position of the
members of society within production. In fact, the modification must
take place in this manner because production and the producers can only
be integrated as a social unit through the operation of the exchange
process. Thus the expropriation of one section of society and the
monopolization of the means of production by another modify the exchange
process, because only there can the fact of social inequality appear.
However, since the exchange relationship is one of equality, social
inequality must assume the form of a parity of prices of production
rather than an equality of value. In other words, the inequality in the
expenditure of labour (which is a matter of indifference to capitalists
since it is the labour expenditure of others) is concealed behind an
equalization of the rate of profit. This kind of equality simply
underlines the fact that capital is the decisive factor in a capitalist
society. The individual act of exchange no longer has to satisfy the
requirement that units of labour in exchange shall be equal, and instead
the principle now prevails that equal profits shall accrue to equal
capitals. The equalization of labour is replaced by the equalization of
profit, and products are sold not at their values, but at their prices
of production.”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development

“If the audience is sleeping during the presentation, one of the following might be wrong; the message, messenger, or market”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“It looked like a market, but such a market as Marra had never seen. There were jeweled pavilions crowded next to mud huts and hide tents and things that looked like upside-down bird nests. The aisles between were crowded, but the people within them did not move like a crowd. They moved like dancers, some light, some heavy, some in circling solitary waltzes. They reminded Marra far more of the courtiers in the prince's palace than of the town on market day.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Nothing is too saturated, you just can't find your own hue.”
― Goitsemang Mvula