Bias

Don’t act smart in the markets

(Excerpt from The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham) The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with...

September 23, 2019| Fallibility, Investing, Overconfidence Bias, Randomness Read More

Modern society is rent-seeking

(Excerpt from Zero to One by Peter Thiel) Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already...

September 21, 2019| Life, Survivorship Bias, Tech Read More

Overconfident people are more dangerous than incompetent people

(Excerpt from Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker) Incompetence is a problem that inexperienced people have, and all things being equal, we don’t entrust inexperienced people with all that much power or...

September 20, 2019| Inversion, Overconfidence Bias, People Read More

Success is 99.9% luck

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) we often have the mistaken impression that a strategy is an excellent strategy, or an entrepreneur a person endowed with “vision,” or a trader a talented trader,...

September 19, 2019| Randomness, Survivorship Bias Read More

Survivors are more obvious than failures

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) There are other aspects to the monkeys problem; in real life the other monkeys are not countable, let alone visible. They are hidden away, as one sees only the...

September 14, 2019| Survivorship Bias Read More

Luck factor increases with sample size

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) The initial sample size matters greatly. If there are five monkeys in the game, I would be rather impressed with the Iliad writer, to the point of suspecting him to...

September 14, 2019| Investing, Randomness, Survivorship Bias Read More

For sure things get you into trouble

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Anonymous...

September 9, 2019| Overconfidence Bias Read More

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