Long or Short Capital

Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy.

Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics Recipient

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“Which explains why the busts and reversals we deem inevitable are also the least preventable, and why they startle us, if briefly, when they come — because they were were inevitable for so long that they should have come already. That they haven’t, we reason, can mean only one of two things. Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey). Either that, or the thing that went up and up and up and hasn’t come down, though it should have long ago, is being held aloft by our decision to forget it’s up there and to carry on as though it weren’t.”
Walter Kirn in November 2007’s The Atlantic

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“I’ll begin with a brief note about the stock market here. Suppose you’re considering riding a unicycle on a high-wire that by most evidence is not secure, but it’s possible that the wire might hold up for a while. If you keep riding, people will throw small bills at you until the moment the wire breaks. Once the wire breaks, you will be injured and will probably lose whatever you gained initially. Would you keep riding?”
John Hussman, Portfolio Manager of Hussman Funds in his Weekly Comment

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Two from 30 Rock:

“This corporation has a strict bros before hoes policy.”

“I like a woman with ambition; it’s like seeing a dog wearing clothes.”
-Jack Donaghy

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Where there’s muck, there’s brass.
UK expression

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I find it extraordinary that if you have two derivative dealers — Dealer A and Dealer B — and both write a ticket, Dealer A records a profit and Dealer B records a profit, particularly if it’s a 20-year contract. That is the kind of world I’d love to live in, but I haven’t found it yet.
Warren Buffett

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HT to To the Hilt

“I have never met a general partner who was not top-quartile. So I wonder where three-quarters of the industry is hiding.”
Oliver Gottschlag on Private Equity firms

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“This guy came in, and I asked what he liked to do for fun. He said, ‘I really enjoy playing hoops.’ I said, ‘We can’t hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot.'”
Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal

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Do you see this? This is the Book of the Dead. All of you are going to be in this book someday, have you thought about that? You’re going to die and all that’s left is your name in this book. So what do you want to do between now and then?”
A Catholic pastor

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I’ve always felt that macroeconomics was not economics the way astrology is not astronomy.
M. Hodak of hodakvalue.com in a post on Marginal Revolution

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Anyone who heeded our advice squeezed tremendous hypothetical returns out of the citrus trade.
Mr. Juggles

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Jack Donaghy: Lemon, I’m impressed! you’re starting to think like a businessman.
Liz Lemon: A businesswoman.
Jack Donaghy: I don’t think that’s a word.
From 30 Rock

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Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
Bob Dylan on how he chose his career

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Everything’s out the window. Tomorrow’s one game. Everything in the last two weeks is in the past and now we’ve got to focus on beating the Padres for a chance to go to the playoffs.
Matt Holliday of the Colorado Rockies, on tomorrow’s one game playoff against the Padres

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