23 Quotes by Bruce Kovner

The first rule of trading - there are probably many first rules - is don't get caught in a situation in which you can lose a great deal of money for reasons you don't understand.

Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.

The Heisenberg principle - If something is closely observed, the odds are it is going to be altered in the process. The more a price pattern is observed by speculators the more prone you have false signals; the more the market is a product of nonspeculative activity, the greater the significance of technical breakout

Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I'm getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis. I never think about other people who may be using the same stop, because the market shouldn't go there if I am right

Risk management is the most important thing to be well understood. Undertrade, undertrade, undertrade is my second piece of advice. Whatever you think your position ought to be, cut it at least in half.

Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he’s not going to take a patient’s temperature.

It has been great fun to find these manuscripts and pull them together into this collection. I trust that what we are doing at the school will make it possible for Juilliard students and scholars to delve into the compositional processes of these great composers and share them with the rest of the world.

At a certain point I realized that it would be better to make this collection available to the rest of the world rather than to keep it under a mattress.

I started collecting just for the personal pleasure of being close to these icons of the greatest musical achievements in Western music.