"It is difficult to assess how much this gambling spirit is active in the minds of individual investors. If it is, even to a small degree, it is relevant to our discussion since it makes investors prone to imitation and herding because they invest on little information. It may also explain the anomalously large volatility of prices and their potential instabilities."

“Perhaps the most profound synthesis of physical sciences came from the realization that everything could be understood from "conservation laws" and symmetry principals.”

“Profiting from being in the minority leads to interesting paradoxes. Rather diabolically, if all traders use the same set of rules, they will end up doing the same thing at the same time and cannot therefore be in the minority.”

“By one estimate, 90% of international transactions were accounted for by trade before 1970, and only 10% by capital flows. Today, despite a vast increase in global trade, that ratio has been reversed, with 90% of transactions accounted for by financial flows not directly related to trade in goods and services.”

“Positive feedbacks, when unchecked, can produce runaways until the deviation from equilibrium is so large that other effects can be abruptly triggered and lead to ruptures and crashes.”

“A bubble that goes up is just one that could have crashed but did not.”

“Knowledge is encoded in models. Models are synthetic sets of rules, and pictures, and algorithms providing us with useful representations of the world of our perceptions and of their patterns.”