Wisdom in fragments

What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

Entrepreneurs have to focus on how a business makes money and focus on that rather than the expense side of the business. That also allows you to start quicker and instead of deferring your idea, you could get to market in 30 days.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

I think it's about usefulness! People talk of 'following your passion' but there are plenty of things people are passionate about that nobody will pay them money for, so you can't just tell someone to just follow their passion. The missing piece? usefulness… We say the magic formula is: Passion + Usefulness = Success.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

If you take a trade that follows your process exactly and if that trade loses money, that was not a bad trade. It's only a bad trade if you deviate from your process and lose money. I would go further and say that if you deviate from your process and make money, it's still a bad trade.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

If you asked most people to categorise good trades and bad trades, you would find the answers to be quite simple… If it makes money it's a good trade, and if it loses money, it's a bad trade. That's not true at all…

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

This is a great analogy as the key to successful trading really is the space between trades! It's not just a matter of making the right trades… but also not doing anything when things aren't right.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

It's a matter of finding an approach that works for the individual. A person has to know whether they are comfortable with fundamental or technical, long term or short term, certain types of markets, wider risk or less risk… You can go through a whole checklist of things and find it's different for each individual.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn't have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life! This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no 'holy grail' or single style that is most effective.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

If you look at the decade which ended in 2009, our estimate is around US$8 trillion. As previously mentioned, we believe this is a very conservative estimate because there are major parts of illicit flows that are not included in that figure.

These models depend entirely on government statistics. They automatically leave out many forms of illicit money such as drug trading, human trafficking, some forms of trade mispricing and so forth. That is why we feel our estimates are very conservative.

We measure these flows entirely based on data filed by governments at the World Bank and the IMF. We apply two very established economic models. One is the World Bank's residual method, and the other is the IMF Direction of Trade statistical approach. These models have been used by economists for decades but we were the first group to apply these models to all developing countries.

The reality is we live in a very dynamic world that's full of risks and all we should really care about are risk drivers – both financial and non-financial. Alternatives may provide us with ways of hedging out or managing future risks better.

If somebody told me the US stock market returned 12% per annum over the last 50 years, I would simply ask them what the returns were over the last 150 years, 250 years, 10 years and so on. I could make up any return I want just by picking the appropriate time period.

None of this is new. The Romans traded forward contracts in commodities 2000 years ago; a Dutch fugitive, Isaac le Maire, conducted the first ever bear attack on a stock in 1610, leading also to the first ever regulatory ban on short-selling that same year.

The notion of 'alternative' as an asset class sits badly with me because for me, saying hedge-funds – as an example – are an asset class is akin to comparing mutual-funds to being an asset class. The sheer diversity within these groups makes it difficult to define them as a class in their own right, given the complete lack of commonalities across the board.

The Pritzker Prize recognizes not just technical excellence, but architects who have made a significant contribution to humanity through the built environment.