Arbitrage Quotes

“Arbitrage is not investing.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Arbitrage for its own sake has no merit of value, and is often a perversion of value — therefore though it may last for a while, it can never be sustained.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Researchers and research organizations who aim to 'change the way people think or do' must have the freedom, not only to be contrarian, bot also the be wrong. Contrariness sometimes leads to failure, but from failure comes learning, and from learning very often comes implausible utility, the useful and surprising.
Contrariness is not the only thing required of researchers to achieve implausible utility, however. The second thing that is required is informedness. Conventional wisdom and existing paradigms 'work' - that is why we adopt them in the first place and that is why we resist so strongly their overthrow. If a researcher is going to take seriously observations and ideas that go against conventional wisdom, the researcher had better have good reasons for doing so - and the discipline to develop those good reasons. These reasons we call informedness - 'inside' knowledge or capabilities the researcher possess that the researcher's peers don't yet have. This inside knowledge makes the researcher think the researcher is right and conventional wisdom is wrong. The researcher is an 'informed contrarian,' going against conventional wisdom but in an informed way to reduce the tremendous risk associated with going against that very wisdom.
Like a financial arbitrageur who uses greater informedness about the true value of an asset to buy those assets currently undervalued by conventional wisdom, informed contrarian researchers are research arbitrageurs who use their greater informedness about the value of a research observation or idea to take seriously those ideas currently undervalued by conventional wisdom.”
― Venkatesh Narayanamurti, The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research