LeSean McCoy Quotes

There’s nothing like doing things with OPM—Other People’s Money. It takes the risk out of it.

People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

Speculation, in its broadest sense, is not an evil in itself, but the contrary, and relieves public distress far oftener than it creates it.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

Just because a company's future is highly uncertain doesn't mean an investment in it is risky. In fact, some of the best potential investments are highly uncertain but have little risk of permanent capital loss.

The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.

There is very little difference between speculation and investment. The only difference is basically that investments are successful speculations because if you successfully anticipate the future you make a speculative profit.

Speculation is a hard and trying business, and a speculator must be on the job all the time or he'll soon have no job to be on.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

Every few seconds it changes - up an eighth, down an eighth - it's like playing a slot machine. I lose $20 million, I gain $20 million.

Pouring concrete on land you don't own is called a calculated risk, if you don't pour you loose millions.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

Leverage is great when it works, and when it doesn't work, it creates a lot of issues. So I think if you limit the amount of leverage that people can borrow, or that banks can borrow, I think you'll find that you'll have a lot less issues going forward.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company's equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

The stock market is a discounter of all known information.

I didn't become interested in derivatives until 1982, 1983.

When you look at a commodities market you need hedgers and speculators. If you don't have one, you don't have a market. That's how it works.

Derivatives are a huge, complex issue.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly.