Code of Honour

• Whoever knows first makes money off whoever hears last—until there are rules.
• Being open isn’t only a duty. It’s also a discount on the price of money.
• Never buy another man’s secrets: the seller will sell yours too.
• Money is a promise. Paper without a promise is litter in a field.
• Give a private banker the right to print money, and it ends with the banker’s ruin.
• A central bank can cure a panic. It can’t cure theft.
• Pick your leverage by the worst month, not the average year.
• A fund that vanishes on the day of trouble was never a fund.
• The game is decided before you sit down at the table: by who you’re playing with.
• Results that are too smooth are the mark of a cardsharp, not a genius.
• The man who manages the money shouldn’t be the man who keeps it.
• Risk seldom disappears; it gets passed on. If you don’t know who’s holding it, you are.
• Cash is shelter from the storm, not a house for life.
• Cut costs from the top, starting with yourself.
• Write the lean-year plan in a fat year: fear makes people stupid.
• An adviser paid by the seller is a seller.
• A lock on pension money doesn’t promise you an old age, but without a lock the money rarely lives to see one.
• Help a man out of your own pocket, not out of his old age.
• Margin doesn’t ask how rich you are. It asks how much you’ll put up tonight.
• The exchange doesn’t remove risk; it changes its shape. Where there’s no exchange, make sure your partner doesn’t want to run.
• No decree can set a price: the goods just move to the back alley.
• Don’t guess. Get ready.
• An offer you can’t refuse is the opposite of an option.
• When one man gets the upside and others get the downside, somewhere a call is being given away.
• An empty yard costs more than its taxes: add the interest on the money you turned down by keeping it.
• Make exceptions out of your own pocket, never out of a fund meant to last for ever.
• A good tip that comes too late is worth six hundred dollars a head.
• Don’t hunt for the needle. Buy the haystack.
• Sure of yourself? Then cap the stake.
• Money spent is spent. Decide by what lies ahead.
• If a lot has gone into a business and it hasn’t got any better, it has only got dearer.
• Real wealth is the kind nobody sees.