I'm a regular reader of Matt Levine's Money Stuff, which is a dense, enormously funny rollup of how the opaque world of finance actually works - or doesn't work - as the case may be.  

 

His full blog can be found here.  https://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money-stuff

 

These are a collection of some of the quotes I have found the most entertaining.

 

On Risk Committees: 

 "When your risk committee is asking everyone who walks into the room, 'hey you got any more risk for us, we need some more risk around here,' you might have a problem." - Matt Levine

 

On Snap's IPO filing:

"I wish that diagram had labels for 'dog tongue' and 'dog ears,' but all in all it is admirably clear. If you want to fit in with the cool teens these days, there's no one better qualified to help you than a team of securities lawyers." - Matt Levine

 

On how Snapchat works:

"But my limited understanding is that the basic point of Snapchat is that you open up the app and somehow a Kardashian is there, and then you consume Kardashian content in some way, and your life is, one assumes, better for it. "  - Matt Levine

 

On-email:

"I hate getting email. But I recognize that the problem is not email as a technology; the problem is people wanting to talk to you. Email is the least annoying way for people to contact you, so it's the most popular, which is why you have so many emails, which is why, paradoxically, it feels so annoying. But, what, you want everyone to start texting you? You want them to send you LinkedIn messages? You want them to call you on the phone?"  - Matt Levine

 

On Banks selling Financial Services:

"

A basic problem in financial markets is that you want to do transactions with people who are good at doing transactions, because they will do a good transaction for you. But if you do transactions with people who are too good at doing transactions, they will do a good transaction to you."  - Matt Levine

 

On the city of Portland deciding to withdraw their investments from the stock market:

Portland 'will likely see a drop in revenue of $4.5 million a year when the $539 million now invested in companies is moved to federal bonds and other places.' 'We can rest assured in Portland that our money won't be funding prisons, pipelines and the occupation of Palestine,' says an activist named Amanda Aguilar Shank, who is going to be disappointed when she learns what federal bonds are used for. 

 - Matt Levine

 

On Trumps Tax Plan:

"Yesterday the Trump administration pretended to release a tax plan, and while this obliges reporters, and poor Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, to pretend that it was a tax plan, we are under no such obligation here. It doesn't even look like a tax plan! You can tell because there are almost no numbers in it, and the fonts are all wrong. Also, it would fit on a napkin, but it takes planning to print things on a napkin, and they clearly wrote this on the bus over to the press conference. It was designed to fool Donald Trump into thinking that it's a tax plan, but the rest of us don't need to be fooled." 

 - Matt Levine

On Greenlight Capital's first-quarter investor letter in 2017,

 

"... Greenlight provided profits, but not alpha, from its longs, and alpha, but not profits, from its shorts. It was good at picking stocks to go down, though they went up, and bad at picking stocks to go up, though they also went up. The most interesting thing about the asset management business is that performance evaluation is hard."  

- Matt Levine

 

On Ponzi Schemes and Forex:

Anyway the moral of the story is if someone guarantees you 12 percent returns with no risk of loss from trading foreign exchange, they are definitely going to steal your money, but if you are reading this you already knew that and there is no real value in my pointing it out. Same for the CFTC, same for everyone. The supply of suckers for foreign-exchange trading scams is constant and mysterious and impervious to education. - Matt Levine

 

On what it takes to be a good salesman:

The second part is just a matter of generic sales and interpersonal skills that are not at all specific to the financial industry. Once, when I was a banker, I left my office briefly to buy shoelaces or something, and the guy who sold them to me talked me into getting a sit-down shoeshine, an experience that I find uncomfortable and would never actually seek out and also did not have time for. But he was very persuasive, and I did it, and hated it, and walked back to my office with the unsettling certainty that the shoeshine guy would be better at my job than I was. The convertible-bond stuff can be taught; the sales skills are hard. - Matt Levine

 

On winning a Nobel Prize:

It is not something I think about a lot, for fairly obvious reasons, but I would like to believe that, if I won a Nobel Prize, I would have enough self-control never to mention it to anyone. Not because I am not desperate for approval and prestige! Certainly, absolutely, I would want everyone I ever met to know that I had won a Nobel Prize. I just mean that it would be so much more satisfying (for me) if they found out on their own. Like I would have normal chats with them about the weather every day, and then one day they would say “oh hey someone told me the other day that you had a Nobel Prize, I didn’t know that, that’s amazing, why didn’t you tell me!” And I’d be like “oh that old thing, yeah, it’s not really a big deal, I never think about it.” Look, I do not know if I could pull it off. Would I occasionally drop cryptic references to Stockholm to try to help them along? Sure, of course, I am only human. But I really do think that I’d mostly be able to delay gratification, because when they did figure it out it would be extra sweet. - Matt Levine

 

On Denmarks "Greeninum" Bond Certificates

“A zero-coupon bond with zero redemption at maturity.” There is something final about that sentence; when you get to a zero-coupon bond with zero redemption at maturity, you know you have come to the end of financial engineering. It is the creation of financial value out of the absence of cash flows.[3] You will give Denmark money for this certificate, and in exchange you will get a certificate. What will you get for the certificate? Well, you will get the certificate - Matt Levine

 

On committing a crime, which is so good they make a movie about it

I try not to give advice around here about how to commit financial crimes, for fairly obvious reasons, but really this is the only advice. If you are doing crimes, arrange your life so as to be able to say later “the truth is too boring, because we made no mistakes.” Of course he said this to an interviewer after serving his prison sentence for the robbery so, you know, some mistakes.- Matt Levine

On Steven Segal being sued by the SEC for not properly disclosing compensation for marketing a cyrpto Initial Coin Offering (ICO):

 

Makes sense! The B2G ICO was marked for death from the beginning, and although these undisclosed celebrity endorsements are under siege, they are hard to kill. The SEC was out for justice, and Seagal is not above the law. - Matt Levine

(Italics mine, and seriously, if you don't appreciate that bit of writing, you have no sense of humor., and should probably check for a pulse.)

On How Wall Street Traders *Really* Make Sell Calls

That implies that they got out mostly on Jan. 27, when GameStop closed at its all-time high.[1] They got into this stock based on fundamental research conducted over months; they called the top perfectly based on an Elon Musk tweet. Honestly I am tearing up a little? These guys get it. What a great investment process. I hope someone is working on a revised edition of Graham & Dodd that incorporates the Did Elon Musk Tweet Yet metric. The best time to buy a stock is a few months before Elon Musk tweets about it; the best time to sell it is the day after he tweets. If Elon Musk just sold advance notice of his tweets to hedge funds, he could be the richest person in the world. - Matt Levine

On How Elon Musk can Make more money Tweeting about Bitcoin than making Cars at Tesla

I’m just saying, if I was Elon Musk, that’s what I would do. Then of course I’d buy more Bitcoins after the price falls, I’d tweet “Bitcoin is great again,” the price would go up, I’d sell my Bitcoins, I’d tweet “oh no it’s bad again,” the price would go down, I’d buy more Bitcoins, I’d tweet “back to great,” etc. etc. etc. This would be vastly more profitable, for Tesla, than making cars, and it would capitalize on Musk’s core skill of trolling people on Twitter. How long do you think he could keep this up? I think the answer is “far longer than I could remain sane while watching it happen. - Matt Levine