Aaron Brown (financial author)

There's no way to know how good a player you are except by measuring against others.

Aaron C. Brown (born November 27, 1956) is an American author and financial trader. He is best-known for the idea that the economics of modern global derivatives evolved from gambling games rather than older financial institutions, and that gambling remains at the core of economic life.

Quotes

The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006)

• Other people snap up the riskless profits pretty fast and bid the price of calculable risk opportunities to near their fair values. Things get a lot less crowded if you go for the incalculable risks, leaps of faith that cannot be inspected carefully before takeoff. So that is where you find extraordinary opportunities.
  • Chapter 1, The Art of Uncalculated Risk, p. 2

• If you want to understand financial markets, and their effects on the economy, you have to understand the trading game. Many short-term price movements are neither random nor caused by economic fundamentals. They're caused by investors buying and selling.
  • Chapter 1, The Art of Uncalculated Risk, p. 12

• You need a strategy, and a trade or investment decision can be evaluated only in the context of that strategy.
  • Chapter 1, The Art of Uncalculated Risk, p. 23

• The trading characteristics of a security become more important than its underlying economics. The virtual economics began to drive the physical economy rather than the other way around.
  • Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 59

• Most people wander through life, carelessly taking whatever risk crosses their paths without compensation, but never consciously accepting extra risk to pick up the money and other good things lying all around them.
  • Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 67

Monotheism introduced the idea that we should passively accept whatever fate God dealt. Gambling seemed to be a refusal to do that.

• There's no way to know how good a player you are except by measuring against others.
  • Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 69

• Monotheism introduced the idea that we should passively accept whatever fate God dealt. Gambling seemed to be a refusal to do that.
  • Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 75

• If no one gambled against the grain in good times, there would be no winners to inspire people in the bad times.
  • Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 81

• Fortunes made buying and selling securities have underwritten economic revolutions.
  • Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 82

• Many financial disasters can be traced to people who thought they were hedging.
  • Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 83

• From the lottery to raise the funds for the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 to the lottery used to pay the interest on Dutch loans to the United States during the Revolutionary War, the development of the United States was funded by gambling.
  • Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 86

• All exchange stimulates productive activity, whether exchange by gift, gambling, barter, or money transaction.
  • Chapter 5, Pokernomics, p. 127

• There is a deep, ancient connection between gambling and divination.
  • Chapter 6, Son of a Soft Money Bank, p. 167

• But you can't ignore dense people-they're not unarmed; they're armed differently.
  • Chapter 8, The Games People Play, p. 231

• Mathematical theory, tested in practice and constantly retested, is a valuable aid to play. Mathematics alone will blind you and let others rob you.
  • Chapter 9, Who Got Game, p. 279

Quotes about Aaron C. Brown

• It is not that gambling imitates economic life, but that economic life is largely modeled after gambling.That was the idea of the original thinker John Law, made infamous with his bankruptcy; Aaron Brown, another original thinker, revives it and takes it further.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Poker Face of Wall Street, Foreword, p. xi