I've learned many things from him, but perhaps the most significant is that it's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Financial success depends on risk management and asymmetrical payoffs rather than just being correct.
- In plain terms
- It matters more how much you gain or lose than whether you are right.
- What can you take from it?
- Focus on managing downside risk and maximizing upside potential.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How do you define success in your field?
- What happens when you are right but lose money?
Another view
This perspective might undervalue the importance of ethical correctness or truth.
More from George Soros
We have a booming global economy but we don't have a global society. Markets reduce everything, including human beings and nature, to commodities. Societies ne…
Permalink to quote #79 Four hundred seventy-three million to one. Those are the odds against George Soros compiling the investment record he did as manager of the Quantum Fund from 1…
Permalink to quote #81 You attain superior long-term returns through preservation of capital and home runs. I'm not better than the next trader, just quicker at admitting my mistakes…
Permalink to quote #78
Related quotes
[I]t does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
Nassim Nicholas TalebNassim Nicholas Taleb quote #3 I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.
Jack BennyJack Benny quote #4 Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
George SorosGeorge Soros quote #6