Andrew Lo quotes:

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.

Most people are overconfident about their own abilities. That is probably a good thing. But we would be horrified if a physician's aide engaged in heart surgery.

What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.

While neurological studies have tried to identify components responsible for fear and greed, the impact on finance is less clear.

If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we're in a different, riskier market now.

During periods of extreme fear or greed, you don't have the proper balance between those two to generate market efficiency and you get extremes in behavior.

The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.

Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor ...

My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, 'What can I do?'

Labor is getting more expensive and technology is getting cheaper.

Cancer is the great equalizer. Everyone is affected by it either themselves or through loved ones.

Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.

Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.

Some people might say, 'Can we afford it?' I think that's asking the wrong question... We should instead be asking, 'Can we really afford not to try?'

Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive.

If we are able to allow people to earn a decent rate of return, with sufficient scale, we can all do well by doing good.

It's important to understand how people perceive risk, and how that translates into investment behavior.

The risks facing hedge funds are non-linear and more complex than those facing traditional asset classessuch risks are currently not widely appreciated or well-understood

My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, What can I do?

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.