Nassim Taleb Tag Archive

True wealth is to do less of a lot of undesirable things

(Excerpt from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb) If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no...

December 14, 2019| Via Negativa Read More

Losing $1 for most expirations and making $10 more than 9.1% of the time

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) There is another type of satisfaction provided by the option seller. It is the steady return and the steady feeling of reward—what psychologists call flow. It...

September 20, 2019| Inversion, Investing, Nonlinearity Read More

Size of wins matters, not frequency of wins

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) The best description of my lifelong business in the market is “skewed bets,” that is, I try to benefit from rare events, events that do not tend to repeat...

September 19, 2019| Investing, Nonlinearity Read More

Definition of blowup

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) The blowup, I will repeat, is different from merely incurring a monetary loss; it is losing money when one does not believe that such fact is possible at all. There...

September 19, 2019| Investing 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

Some advantages of randomness

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date...

September 15, 2019| Randomness Read More

Persevere for nonlinear effects

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always...

September 15, 2019| Investing, Nonlinearity Read More

We can’t move away from suboptimal QWERTY

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) The arrangement of the letters on a typewriter is an example of the success of the least deserving method. For our typewriters have the order of the letters on...

September 15, 2019| Path Dependence, Structure drives behaviour Read More

Luck alone can create successful fund managers

(Extracted from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) We create a cohort that is composed exclusively of incompetent managers. We will define an incompetent manager as someone who has a negative expected return,...

September 15, 2019| Investing, Randomness 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

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