More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

Years later, (Paul) Jones described the mental gymnastics that went into writing these scripts. "Every evening I would close my eyes in a quiet place in my apartment ... I would visualize the opening and walk myself through the day and imagine the different emotional states the market would go through... Then when you get there, you are ready for it. You have been there before. You are in a mental state to take advantage of emotional extremes because you have already lived through them.

He read Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli.

He commuted to his Canadian office in a Ferrari, though sometimes snowy conditions forced him to use Bentley.

All new markets are inefficient at first,

Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb the consequences of the risks that they take on.

Edward Crosby Johnson II, who in the 1950s established Fidelity as a dominant investment firm and made the same point in his own way: “The market is like a beautiful woman—endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying. I have been absorbed and immersed since 1924 and I know this is no science. It is an art…. It is personal intuition.