On Liar’s Poker — Michael Lewis
Markets do not reward the person who is right. They reward the person who is believed. Michael Lewis walked off the Salomon Brothers floor in the late 1980s intending to write a warning. Wall Street read it as a recruitment brochure — and that misreading is the whole point.
A good trader is not a good forecaster. A good trader is someone the room cannot afford to bet against.
The floor Lewis describes runs on a single scarce resource: conviction. Everyone has access to roughly the same numbers. What separates the man who clears a million from the man who clears nothing is the ability to …