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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (English Edition) par [Nassim Taleb]

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (English Edition) Format Kindle

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Everyone wants to succeed in life. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy; or something altogether more unpredictable? This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. It is all about luck: more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the markets we hear an entrepreneur has vision or a trader is talented, but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist. This irreverent bestseller has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them how to recognize randomness. Now it can do the same for you.

Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée

359 pages
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Anglais
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Penguin
Date de publication

3 mai 2007
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1506 KB
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Description du produit

Quatrième de couverture

Everyone wants to succeed in life. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy; or something altogether more unpredictable? This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. It is all about luck: more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the markets we hear an entrepreneur has vision or a trader is talented, but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist. This irreverent bestseller has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them how to recognize randomness. Now it can do the same for you. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.

Extrait

Chapter 1

Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression “rich as Croesus” to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited by Solon, the Greek legislator known for his dignity, reserve, upright morals, humility, frugality, wisdom, intelligence, and courage. Solon did not display the smallest surprise at the wealth and splendor surrounding his host, nor the tiniest admiration for their owner. Croesus was so irked by the manifest lack of impression on the part of this illustrious visitor that he attempted to extract from him some acknowledgment. He asked him if he had known a happier man than him. Solon cited the life of a man who led a noble existence and died while in battle. Prodded for more, he gave similar examples of heroic but terminated lives, until Croesus, irate, asked him point-blank if he was not to be considered the happiest man of all. Solon answered: “The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man’s happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.”

The modern equivalent has been no less eloquently voiced by the baseball coach Yogi Berra, who seems to have translated Solon’s outburst from the pure Attic Greek into no less pure Brooklyn English with “it ain’t over until it’s over,” or, in a less dignified manner, with “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” In addition, aside from his use of the vernacular, the Yogi Berra quote presents an advantage of being true, while the meeting between Croesus and Solon was one of those historical facts that benefited from the imagination of the chroniclers, as it was chronologically impossible for the two men to have been in the same location.

Part I is concerned with the degree to which a situation may yet, in the course of time, suffer change. For we can be tricked by situations involving mostly the activities of the goddess Fortuna—Jupiter’s firstborn daughter. Solon was wise enough to get the following point; that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness. Solon also had the intuition of a problem that has obsessed science for the past three centuries. It is called the problem of induction. I call it in this book the black swan or the rare event. Solon even understood another linked problem, which I call the skewness issue; it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Yet the story of Croesus has another twist. Having lost a battle to the redoubtable Persian king Cyrus, he was about to be burned alive when he called Solon’s name and shouted (something like) “Solon, you were right” (again this is legend). Cyrus asked about the nature of such unusual invocations, and he told him about Solon’s warning. This impressed Cyrus so much that he decided to spare Croesus’ life, as he reflected on the possibilities as far as his own fate was concerned. People were thoughtful at that time.

If You’re So Rich, Why Aren’t You So Smart?

An illustration of the effect of randomness on social pecking order and jealousy, through two characters of opposite attitudes. On the concealed rare event. How things in modern life may change rather rapidly, except, perhaps, in dentistry.

Nero Tulip

Hit by Lightning

Nero Tulip became obsessed with trading after witnessing a strange scene one spring day as he was visiting the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A red convertible Porsche, driven at several times the city speed limit, abruptly stopped in front of the entrance, its tires emitting the sound of pigs being slaughtered. A visibly demented athletic man in his thirties, his face flushed red, emerged and ran up the steps as if he were chased by a tiger. He left the car double-parked, its engine running, provoking an angry fanfare of horns. After a long minute, a bored young man clad in a yellow jacket (yellow was the color reserved for clerks) came down the steps, visibly untroubled by the traffic commotion. He drove the car into the underground parking garage—perfunctorily, as if it were his daily chore.

That day Nero Tulip was hit with what the French call a coup de foudre, a sudden intense (and obsessive) infatuation that strikes like lightning. “This is for me!” he screamed enthusiastically—he could not help comparing the life of a trader to the alternative lives that could present themselves to him. Academia conjured up the image of a silent university office with rude secretaries; business, the image of a quiet office staffed with slow thinkers and semislow thinkers who express themselves in full sentences.

Temporary Sanity

Unlike a coup de foudre, the infatuation triggered by the Chicago scene has not left him more than a decade and a half after the incident. For Nero swears that no other lawful profession in our times could be as devoid of boredom as that of the trader. Furthermore, although he has not yet practiced the profession of high-sea piracy, he is now convinced that even that occupation would present more dull moments than that of the trader.

Nero could best be described as someone who randomly (and abruptly) swings between the deportment and speech manners of a church historian and the verbally abusive intensity of a Chicago pit trader. He can commit hundreds of millions of dollars in a transaction without a blink or a shadow of a second thought, yet agonize between two appetizers on the menu, changing his mind back and forth and wearing out the most patient of waiters.

Nero holds an undergraduate degree in ancient literature and mathematics from Cambridge University. He enrolled in a Ph.D. program in statistics at the University of Chicago but, after completing the prerequisite coursework, as well as the bulk of his doctoral research, he switched to the philosophy department. He called the switch “a moment of temporary sanity,” adding to the consternation of his thesis director, who warned him against philosophers and predicted his return back to the fold. He finished writing his thesis in philosophy. But not the Derrida continental style of incomprehensible philosophy (that is, incomprehensible to anyone outside of their ranks, like myself). It was quite the opposite; his thesis was on the methodology of statistical inference in its application to the social sciences. In fact, his thesis was indistinguishable from a thesis in mathematical statistics—it was just a bit more thoughtful (and twice as long).

It is often said that philosophy cannot feed its man—but that was not the reason Nero left. He left because philosophy cannot entertain its man. At first, it started looking futile; he recalled his statistics thesis director’s warnings. Then, suddenly, it started to look like work. As he became tired of writing papers on some arcane details of his earlier papers, he gave up the academy. The academic debates bored him to tears, particularly when minute points (invisible to the noninitiated) were at stake. Action was what Nero required. The problem, however, was that he selected the academy in the first place in order to kill what he detected was the flatness and tempered submission of employment life.

After witnessing the scene of the trader chased by a tiger, Nero found a trainee spot on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the large exchange where traders transact by shouting and gesticulating frenetically. There he worked for a prestigious (but eccentric) local, who trained him in the Chicago style, in return for Nero solving his mathematical equations. The energy in the air proved motivating to Nero. He rapidly graduated to the rank of self-employed trader. Then, when he got tired of standing on his feet in the crowd, and straining his vocal cords, he decided to seek employment “upstairs,” that is, trading from a desk. He moved to the New York area and took a position with an investment house.

Nero specialized in quantitative financial products, in which he had an early moment of glory, became famous and in demand. Many investment houses in New York and London flashed huge guaranteed bonuses at him. Nero spent a couple of years shuttling between the two cities, attending important “meetings” and wearing expensive suits. But soon Nero went into hiding; he rapidly pulled back to anonymity—the Wall Street stardom track did not quite fit his temperament. To stay a “hot trader” requires some organizational ambitions and a power hunger that he feels lucky not to possess. He was only in it for the fun—and his idea of fun does not include administrative and managerial work. He is susceptible to conference room boredom and is incapable of talking to businessmen, particularly the run-of-the-mill variety. Nero is allergic to the vocabulary of business talk, not just on plain aesthetic grounds. Phrases like “game plan,” “bottom line,” “how to get there from here,” “we provide our clients with solutions,” “our mission,” and other hackneyed expressions that dominate meetings lack both the precision and the coloration that he prefers to hear. Whether people populate silence with hollow sentences, or if such meetings present any true merit, he does not know; at any rate he did not want to be part of it. Indeed Nero’s extensive social life includes almost no businesspeople. But unlike me (I can be extremely humiliating when someone rubs me the wrong way with inelegant pompousness), Nero handles himself with gentle aloofness in these circumstances.

So, Nero switched careers to what is called proprietary trading. Traders are set up as independent entities, internal funds with their own allocation of capital. They are left alone to do as they please, provided of course that their results satisfy the executives. The name proprietary comes from the fact that they trade the company’s own capital. At the end of the year they receive between 7% and 12% of the profits generated. The proprietary trader has all the benefits of self-employment, and none of the burdens of running the mundane details of his own business. He can work any hours he likes, travel at a whim, and engage in all manner of personal pursuits. It is paradise for an intellectual like Nero who dislikes manual work and values unscheduled meditation. He has been doing that for the past ten years, in the employment of two different trading firms.

Modus Operandi

A word on Nero’s methods. He is as conservative a trader as one can be in such a business. In the past he has had good years and less than good years—but virtually no truly “bad” years. Over these years he has slowly built for himself a stable nest egg, thanks to an income ranging between $300,000 and (at the peak) $2.5 million. On average, he manages to accumulate $500,000 a year in after-tax money (from an average income of about $1 million); this goes straight into his savings account. In 1993, he had a bad year and was made to feel uncomfortable in his company. Other traders made out much better, so the capital at his disposal was severely reduced, and he was made to feel undesirable at the institution. He then went to get an identical job, down to an identically designed workspace, but in a different firm that was friendlier. In the fall of 1994 the traders who had been competing for the great performance award blew up in unison during the worldwide bond market crash that resulted from the random tightening by the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. They are all currently out of the market, performing a variety of tasks. This business has a high mortality rate.

Why isn’t Nero more affluent? Because of his trading style—or perhaps his personality. His risk aversion is extreme. Nero’s objective is not to maximize his profits, so much as it is to avoid having this entertaining machine called trading taken away from him. Blowing up would mean returning to the tedium of the university or the nontrading life. Every time his risks increase, he conjures up the image of the quiet hallway at the university, the long mornings at his desk spent in revising a paper, kept awake by bad coffee. No, he does not want to have to face the solemn university library where he was bored to tears. “I am shooting for longevity,” he is wont to say.

Nero has seen many traders blow up, and does not want to get into that situation. Blow up in the lingo has a precise meaning; it does not just mean to lose money; it means to lose more money than one ever expected, to the point of being thrown out of the business (the equivalent of a doctor losing his license to practice or a lawyer being disbarred). Nero rapidly exits trades after a predetermined loss. He never sells “naked options” (a strategy that would leave him exposed to large possible losses). He never puts himself in a situation where he can lose more than, say, $1 million—regardless of the probability of such an event. That amount has always been variable; it depends on his accumulated profits for the year. This risk aversion prevented him from making as much money as the other traders on Wall Street who are often called “Masters of the Universe.” The firms he has worked for generally allocate more money to traders with a different style from Nero, like John, whom we will encounter soon.

Nero’s temperament is such that he does not mind losing small change. “I love taking small losses,” he says. “I just need my winners to be large.” In no circumstances does he want to be exposed to those rare events, like panics and sudden crashes, that wipe a trader out in a flash. To the contrary, he wants to benefit from them. When people ask him why he does not hold on to losers, he invariably answers that he was trained by “the most chicken of them all,” the Chicago trader Stevo who taught him the business. This is not true; the real reason is his training in probability and his innate skepticism.

From the Trade Paperback edition. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Peter L. Bernstein, President, Peter L. Bernstein Inc. and author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.

". . . Taleb will grab you. As a non-random consequence, your understanding of life (and your money) will expand exponentially." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Victory Niederhoffer, author of The Education of a Speculator

"Whether you agree with Mr. Taleb or not, his book will leave you with many suggestive queries." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Amazon.com

If the prescriptions for getting rich that are outlined in books such as The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad are successful enough to make the books bestsellers, then one must ask, Why aren't there more millionaires? In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professional trader and mathematics professor, examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Part of what makes this book so good is Taleb's ability to make seemingly arcane mathematical concepts (at least to this reviewer) entirely relevant in evaluating and understanding everything from the stock market to the success of those millionaires cited in the aforementioned bestsellers. Here's an articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure that anyone who wants a little more of the former would do well to consider. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Paul Wilmott, author of Derivatives: The Theory and Practice of Financial Engineering

"A blast of common sense. From classical to modern philosophers, via cab drivers, businessmen, and dentists . . ." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Revue de presse

One of the smartest books of all time (Fortune )

Wall Street's principal dissident (Malcolm Gladwell )

Brilliant (John Kay )

An iconoclastic tour de force (Evening Standard ) --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the founder of Empirica Capital LLC, a crisis-hunting hedge fund operator, and a fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has held a variety of derivative trading positions in New York and London and worked as an independent floor trader in Chicago. Taleb was inducted in February 2001 in the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame.

Taleb received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris Dauphine. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (Wiley, 1997).

--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Booklist

Taleb is a "quant," or mathematical trader, and an expert on financial derivatives who has made a name for himself in investing circles as a voluble critic of popular theories and conventional wisdom. He is also the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (1996). Taleb is fluent in seven languages and a reader of classical literature, an avocation that readily manifests itself in this meandering discourse on the roles of probability, luck, and risk in the markets and in life. Taleb examines how and why the attempt to determine cause and effect is continually hampered by random occurrences and our emotional responses to them. He freely shares his ideas and opinions, finding insights in the funeral of Jackie Onassis, B. F. Skinner's experiments on pigeons, Solon's warning, Karl Popper's work, George Soros, Darwinism, the O. J. Simpson trial, Pascal's wager, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, birthdays, taxicabs, and especially the works of ancient Greek philosophers. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Book Description

This book is about luck -- or more precisely how we perceive and deal with luck in business and life.

Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill -- the world of trading -- Fooled by Randomness is a captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining and narrative style, the author succeeds in tackling and explaining three major intellectual issues: the problem of induction, the survivorship biases, and our genetic unfitness to the modern world.

The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: Yogi Berra, the baseball legend; Karl Popper, the philosopher of knowledge; Solon, the Ancient World's wisest man; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Ulysses. In addition we meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his trading life, but who also falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness.

But the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed -- the lucky fool in the right place at the right time. The embodiment of the "Survival of the Least Fit." Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru's insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained through chance. A monkey banging on a keyboard may eventually produce the Iliad, but would you sign him to write the sequel?

Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary?

Must we always try to uncover non-existent messages in random events?

It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the Goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared.

--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

JA Majors Book Info

(Texere) Author addresses the apparently irrational movement of money markets around the world. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In this look at financial luck, hedge fund manager Taleb (Dynamic Hedging) addresses the apparently irrational movement of money markets around the world. Using his own investing experience and examples of others' successes and disappointments, he discusses theories like Monte Carlo math (easy; considered cheating by purists) and the concept of Russian roulette. Taleb tells interesting, well-wrought stories about individual behavior: "While Nero has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, both personally and intellectually, he is starting to consider himself as having missed a chance somewhere." While serious investors and mathematics enthusiasts will be intrigued, readers looking for practical investment strategies will be disappointed by this rambling intellectual discourse. Tables. 40,000-copy first printing; $150,000 marketing budget.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Biographie de l'auteur

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the founder of Empirica Capital LLC, and Fellow of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He was inducted into the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame in 2001. He lives in New York. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Détails sur le produit

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002RI9BH6
Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1er édition (3 mai 2007)
Langue ‏ : ‎ Anglais
Taille du fichier ‏ : ‎ 1506 KB
Synthèse vocale ‏ : ‎ Activée
Lecteur d’écran ‏ : ‎ Pris en charge
Confort de lecture ‏ : ‎ Activé
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Activé
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Activé
Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée ‏ : ‎ 359 pages

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5 étoiles		65%
4 étoiles		21%
3 étoiles		8%
2 étoiles		3%
1 étoile		3%

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Client d'Amazon

Seemingly easy to read, don’t get fooled

Commenté en France le 9 juillet 2020

Achat vérifié

There is great value in reading NN Taleb, but it is not “face value”. If you expect insights which you can copy paste into your life to become a better person, better trader or whatever ... You will be disappointed.

Fooled by Randomness is an invitation to reason, to think beyond the appearances, it contains various anecdotes from the life of NN Taleb, as well as hitorical ones. These are meant to trigger thought on the concepts which are laid in the book, and make you ponder on how randomness affects your life and the ones surrounding you.

It is seemingly easy to read, but if you want to get the real value out of it you will need to pause, dig and take the extra mile of thought. NN Taleb points to the source, but it is up to you to take the additional steps to drink from it.

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

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Guillaume Bersac

Commenté en France le 11 mai 2017

Achat vérifié

Très intelligent. Nassim Taleb, définitivement mon économiste préféré, nous démontre à quel point le monde dans lequel nous vivons échappe à notre compréhension et donne des clés sur comment gérer cette non connaissance.

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

One of my best books ever

Commenté en France le 3 octobre 2013

Achat vérifié

La littérature de business et de management est jonchée de livres sur la réussite, comment réussir sa vie bla bla bla...Il suffit que quelqu'un ait une expérience fructueuse pour qu'il se permet de donner des leçons à autrui et les gens sont en général friands de ce genre de littérature. Mais qu'en est-il du facteur chance? Où sont ces gents qui ont fait la même chose mais qui n'ont pas réussi? l'auteur parle du "survivorship bias". Lisez ce livre pour en savoir plus

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

Commenté en France le 17 juin 2020

Achat vérifié

Livre à lire pour ceux qui s'intéressent aux probabilités.
Satisfait de l'achat et de l'expédition

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

Très intéressant !!

Commenté en France le 28 octobre 2019

Achat vérifié

Très intéressant pour changer ton business mindset.

Alvaro APARICIO

Rarement le hazard a été aussi bien appréhendé jusqu'à maintenant!

Commenté en France le 1 décembre 2007

Il y a peu de matières aussi peu intuitives que la théorie des probabilités (est-ce que ça vous parle un résultat valable "presque sûrement" ou "presque partout"?). Ce livre offre des exemples aussi parlants que drôles de résultats d'un premier abord indigestes sous leur forme mathématique. On apprécie ou pas le ton employé, mais pour ce qui est du traitement du sujet il est difficile de faire mieux. Ce livre est un exemple de pluridisciplinarité : maths, psychologie, économies, philosophie (épistémologie) et ironie y sont magistralement déployés et illustrés.

6 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

L'Investisseur Français

Lecture transformatrice

Commenté en France le 11 avril 2016

Sans doute l'un des ouvrages les plus sous-estimés de la littérature business. Taleb prouve qu'il est plus qu'un génial causeur cultivé : c'est un aussi un penseur supérieur, et un auteur efficace.

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

Fooled by emptiness

Commenté en France le 26 décembre 2009

Au final, ce livre sonne plutôt creux. Du pseudo philosophique, un peu de maths et quelques anecdotes plus tard, il n'y a pas grand chose à retenir de ce livre écrit dans un style peu lisible.

Autant relire "random walk".

Je tire cependant de ce livre un seul point édifiant - et très important : plus on cherche à observer souvent la performance d'un investissement, plus on risque de voir du bruit plutôt que la performance intrinsèque.

Rien que ce point mérite les 3 étoiles.

4 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

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Vaddadi Kartick

10% insight, 90% rambling.

Commenté en Inde le 5 mars 2019

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Nassim is an intellectual with original ideas, but a bad communicator, so it's not worth your time to wade through the 90% rambling to get to the 10% insight. Which is ironic, because Nassim criticises people who appear on TV as being good at communication but wrong in what they're communicating. He's right, one the opposite is no good either, because there are thousands of other books we could be reading to learn things, and this book is a poor ROI. Nassim should have cut out 90% of the pages, and I'd then rate it 5 stars.

In another instance, Nassim criticises an interviewer for pointing out to an expert that his ideas if followed would have caused a loss. Nassim doesn't explain why this objection is invalid.

On the plus side, there are some interesting ideas here:
- We're good at understanding even bets, where there's a 50% chance in your favor, not skewed bets, where the chance is more on one side.
- A 20% chance of making 1 crore is not the same as a 10% chance of making 2 crores, though both have the same expected value of 20 lac. Expected value is not the only factor in analysing bets.
- The human mind is poor at understanding probabilistic thinking, because it's counter-intuitive.
- When Nassim was asked on one instance whether he thinks the market will go up or down, he said that it's likely to go up but he bet that it went down. Why? Because if it goes up, it goes up only a little, but if it goes down, it's expected to go down a lot, so the expected value is negative.
- The more often you check your portfolio, the more likely you'll find dips, which will make you feel bad. A negative event isn't counter-balanced by a positive event — it requires roughly two positive events to counter-balance it. So Nassim, aware of his own irrational mind, checks his portfolio rarely. And so should we.
- Randomness plays a big part in outcomes, and most people take credit for good luck but blame bad luck on things beyond their control. Plus there's so much ego involved.
- A family earning half a million dollars a year and staying in fashionable Park Avenue in New York, where they're the poorest in their apartment building, will be happier if they move to a middle-class area, where people will look up to, not down at, them.
- A person who repeatedly takes bets and is proven right for a decade can still be wrong, and gives us the example of a trader who was right for two decades, and then went bankrupt. If you bet that rare things won't happen, it may take a decade or two for luck to catch up with you.
- Everyone assumes rare things won't happen, while Nassim bets that they will. Nassim loses money every day for years, and finally earns a lot to make up for all the losses, though it's emotionally draining to see money go out every day. Nassim knows his worst-case scenario, while others don't.
- Wall St banks have bad incentives and will never behave properly. Bad behavior is ignored as long as it produces a profit.
- "Stochastic" means a process consisting of a sequence of random events. Not one event.
- Monte Carlo techniques are computer programs that simulate thousands of scenarios, all random, and give you a conclusion like: 20% of the time, you go bankrupt. 30% of the time, you make a million dollars. The rest of the time, you earn a modest return of 10-20% on your investment. This is a much better way of analysing things than a single number, like: what is the probability that this investment technique produces a 15% profit?
- Monte Carlo techniques are the only option when the equations to model things are too complex. Monte Carlo is brute force, and works.
- Survivorship bias means that the average fund manager has a high return because the rest are out of business. If you count them, the average return is low.
- Nassim is an intellectual and prefers thinking to working.

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Joris

Waste of time

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 23 août 2018

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This book has very little of interest to offer. Moreover, it's very irritating that the author incessantly keeps on advocating his personal opinions, some of which are very quaint to say the least (science/mathematics are bad whole philosophy is good, he knows how stock markets work while everyone else is ignorant or misinformed - by formal education, no less, etc, etc,)

Avoid this empty piece of fluff and go read "thinking fast and slow".

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T.T

Ignore the hate as there is value to be gained by reading this.

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 1 octobre 2019

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I had my doubts about buying this book initially due to some of the hate Taleb seems to get for his style. Having now finished reading this book, I will admit that if you can get past the author's arrogance in some places and overlook these as mere human flaws, then you will gain value from his insights. As I am both a long term investor & short term trader, I found the real-life explanations of the psychological processes of Nassim's trader colleagues worth the read alone. Hearing what led up to these traders having such an amazing run over many years and then what caused them to blow up their firms accounts enables small time investors like myself to avoid their mindset.

This was my first Nassim Taleb book I've read, so I can't compare to his two main books Anti-fragile & The Black Swan, although I will be reading those next.

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Harald

Dry theory explained through exciting stories.

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 16 juin 2020

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Taleb comes across as an arrogant writer but if you look beyond it then you discover a brilliant theory, relevant for everyone, who is interested in randomness, statistics, correlation/causation, etc.

Is it only for numberphiles? No, it probably is too basic for the ‘initiated’; even though they still might enjoy the examples and life stories.

Everything is well explained in a simple manner; probably also because Taleb is not as brilliant as he thinks.

The outcome is a practical theory, exciting, and filled with anecdotes of an unusual character.

Lets put it this way, this book makes a dry theory entertaining and accessible to everyone. That should be applauded.

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Dave

Simply Brilliant

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 22 novembre 2020

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I've had a couple of samples of Taleb's books on my Kindle for ages, and I finally got round to reading "The Black Swan" and before I finished it (in fact, before I finished the sample), I bought everything by Taleb I could find. He's not for everyone (or even many people, I hope) but I find him a kindred spirit. He may be the first person I've ever come across who likes Sir Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend. He takes Logical Positivism seriously. He actually understands evolution.
"The Black Swan" taught me about something I sort of intuitively knew about, but couldn't quite articulate, and doubted myself when I tried: the importance of very unlikely, but very costly risks ("'black swan' events"). But this earlier work seems a better place to start. While Taleb writes well, it's not an easy read. He keeps saying that people misrepresent him for a reason: it's very easy to do. The digested NN Taleb is that success is *partly* down to luck (and the "*partly*" gets omitted by a lot of people). This isn't the place to summarise why he thinks that. Read the damn book.
Coda: this book covered a lot of material that was in my undergraduate degree and quite a lot that should have been. If you're an undergraduate in *any* of the sciences, this book will at the least, do you no harm, and may come in useful at some unexpected moment. If you've got a degree, you should have read this book, so if you haven't, make good that omission now. If you have the sense not to have a degree, well, this book is for you too.

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