Nassim Taleb / Universa Investments

Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby LenaHuat » Wed Feb 23, 2011 9:15 am

What's unfolding in the Middle East is a black swan event. Re-read this thread on how to capitalize on it.
Please be forewarned that you are reading a post by an otiose housewife. ImageImage**Image**Image@@ImageImageImage
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby kampungboy » Sat Apr 09, 2011 5:44 pm

I felt goose bump when I am rereading Black Swan (published 2007) while Fukushima nuclear plant incident still pretty much in a mess.

Excerpt from Chapter 5 "Clearly, weather related and geodesic event such as tornadoes and earthquakes, have not changed much over the past millennium, but what have changed are the socioeconomic consequences of such occurrences.

Today, an earthquake or hurricane commands more and more severe economic consequences than it did in the past because of the interlocking relationships between economic entities and the intensification of "network effects."

Matters that used to have mild effects now command a high impact. Tokyo's 1923 earthquake caused a drop of about a third in Japan's GNP. Extrapolating from the tragedy of Kobe in 1994, we can easily infer that the consequences of another such earthquake in Tokyo would be far costlier than of its predecessor."
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Wed May 18, 2011 7:11 am

Black Swan , Taleb – Reminding Everyone – Have A Risk Strategy From The Start! By Kevin Grewal

From an interview with the infamous Nassim Taleb of Black Swan -http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2755

Taleb: That’s true. But I’ve been trying to emphasize the true message of the black swan, which is that there are some environments in which rare events are simply not predictable.

Most people think that they can predict the black swan, that with quantitative sophistication they can get answers. They don’t get the idea that because we can’t predict black swans, then we need to restructure institutions and rethink strategies to be more robust in the face of uncertainty.


http://www.dailymarkets.com/stock/2011/ ... the-start/
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Thu Oct 06, 2011 5:31 pm

yada yada ...

Taleb: It’s Worse Than 2008 By Jeff Harding

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of one of my favorite books, The Black Swan, and closet Austrian theory economics student, is someone whom we should all listen to when he talks about economics. He said this at a conference in Ukraine:

… the current global market turmoil is worse than it was in 2008 because countries such as the U.S. have larger sovereign-debt loads.

“Definitely, we face a bigger problem now and we will pay a higher price,” Taleb, who is also a professor at New York University, said today at a news conference in Kiev, referring to the turmoil during the last global financial crisis.

“The structure of the problem has still not been understood. We haven’t done anything constructive in three and a half years. Nobody wants to do anything drastic now.”


Source: Daily Capitalist
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Sat Oct 15, 2011 8:03 am

Nassim Nicholas Taleb... and the Pursuit of Phronesis
by Alexander Green


Many of you have had the pleasure of hearing Nassim Nicholas Taleb speak at our Agora Wealth Symposium in Vancouver.

Dr. Taleb is the bestselling author of "Fooled by Randomness," about the underestimation of randomness in modern life, and "The Black Swan," about the likelihood of major, unpredictable events occurring in financial markets.

(With auspicious timing, the latter came out just as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 began to unfold.) Both books are now considered investment classics.

Taleb is an insightful and unorthodox thinker. A practitioner of mathematical finance, he is an Oxford University professor, a former hedge fund manager and a scientific advisor at Universa Investments.

When I last chatted with him, he told me he was writing a book about religion. That is still in the works, however. Last year he published "The Bed of Procrustes," a collection of philosophical thoughts about work, life and the limits of our understanding.

Taleb believes that when facing situations where we have limited knowledge, we tend to squeeze our thinking into widely accepted ideas and prepackaged narratives... with potentially explosive consequences.

(Many investors learned this the hard way during the financial meltdown a few years ago.) His goal is to get you to reexamine your premises.

Taleb's points are often counterintuitive. Some are maddening. A few are elitist. Virtually all are thought provoking. That alone makes him worth reading.

Here is just a small sampling:

• Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

• Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.

• Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust and heroic life.

• They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

• Don't cross a river because it is on average four feet deep.

• Asking science to explain life and vital matters, is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

• Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief. By accepting the sacred, you reinvent religion.

• After a long diet from the media, I came to realize that there is nothing that's not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library.
• The opposite of success isn't failure; it's name-dropping.

• Read nothing from the past one hundred years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water).

• In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the magnificent is the "great-souled" who thinks of himself as worthy of great things and, aware of his own position in life, abides by a certain system of ethics that excludes pettiness...

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments

• You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

• You are rich if and only if the money you refuse tastes better, than the money you accept.

• It is as difficult to change someone's opinions, as it is to change his tastes.

• The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

• Your reputation is harmed the most, by what you say to defend it.

• There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

• My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

• Older people are most beautiful, when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and the absence of agitation.

• We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

• You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

• The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

• "Wealthy" is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure "unwealth," that is, the difference between what you have and what you would like to have.

More than anything, the book is an eloquent plea to slow down and think. Indeed, Taleb provides no commentary on any of his short sayings. His intention is not to explain but to provoke.

An aphorism, he believes, is like poetry, something the reader needs to work out for himself.

Source: Spiritual Wealth
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Thu May 31, 2012 9:29 am

Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb: Forget the euro crisis... The U.S. is in far worse shape

Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan," said he favors investing in Europe over the U.S. even with the possible breakup of the single European currency in part because of the euro area's superior deficit situation.

Europe's lack of a centralized government is another reason it's preferable to invest in the region, said Taleb, a professor of risk engineering at New York University whose 2007 best- selling book argued that history is littered with rare events that can't be predicted by trends.

A breakup of the euro "is not a big deal," Taleb said yesterday at an event in Montreal hosted by the Alternative Investment Management Association.

"When they break it up, there will be a lot of fun currencies. This is why I am not afraid of Europe, or investing in Europe. I'm afraid of the United States."

The budget deficit as a proportion of gross domestic product in the U.S. amounted to 8.2 percent at the end of 2011, government figures show. That's twice the 4.1 percent ratio for euro-region countries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

"Of course Europe has its problems, but it's in much better shape than the United States," Taleb said. He voiced similar concerns about U.S. prospects at a conference in Tokyo in September.

Rising interest rates would make things worse for the U.S., said Taleb, a principal at hedge fund Universa Investments LP who also serves as an adviser to the International Monetary Fund.

"We have zero interest rates," Taleb said. "If interest rates go up in the United States, you can imagine what the deficit would be. Europe is like someone who is ill but is conscious of it. In the United States we are ill, but we don't know it. We don't talk about it."

Europe's lack of a centralized government works in its favor, he said.

"The best thing Europe ever did is managing to have members bickering with each other, so you don't have the big government," Taleb said.

"Centralized government doesn't work. In Europe they tried to have a powerful Brussels, but what happens when you have a powerful Brussels? You have lobbies hijacking Brussels."


Source: Bloomberg
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Tue Oct 16, 2012 6:08 am

The Problem With Centralisation

Nassim Taleb slams the European project. Perfect timing to counteract the Nobel Peace Prize nonsense.


The European Union is a horrible, stupid project. The idea that unification would create an economy that could compete with China and be more like the United States is pure garbage.

What ruined China, throughout history, is the top-down state. What made Europe great was the diversity: political and economic. Having the same currency, the euro, was a terrible idea. It encouraged everyone to borrow to the hilt.

The most stable country in the history of mankind, and probably the most boring, by the way, is Switzerland. It’s not even a city-state environment; it’s a municipal state.

Most decisions are made at the local level, which allows for distributed errors that don’t adversely affect the wider system.

Meanwhile, people want a united Europe, more alignment, and look at the problems. The solution is right in the middle of Europe — Switzerland. It’s not united! It doesn’t have a Brussels! It doesn’t need one.

http://azizonomics.com/2012/10/13/the-p ... alisation/
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Tue Nov 20, 2012 3:56 am

And this guy has been waiting for a while to appear :P. Is it not coincidence that he only appears after things are bad and not before ?

Taleb: Learn to Love Volatility By Barry Ritholtz

“In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.”

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Taleb’s contribution to the world of finance are two fascinating concepts — essays really — subsequently expanded into book length.

The first is Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, which describes the tendency of investors to find patterns where none exist, and to attribute to skill that which might be better credited to luck.

His second book is a corollary of sorts, almost the inverse to Fooled by Randomness: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The key takeaway being that we dramatically underestimate the probabilities of improbable events, as well as their outsized impacts.

Over the weekend, Taleb had a worthwhile essay in the WSJ: Learning to Love Volatility. I can sum it up in Taleb’s 5 rules:


Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

Rule 2: Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.

Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.

Rule 5: Decision makers must have skin in the game.

Its worth reading the entire thing.

Over the years, I’ve found that Taleb’s essays are the best way to digest his thinking. This one is no different.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 83448.html

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/ta ... olatility/
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Fri Nov 30, 2012 6:33 am

'Black Swan' Author Taleb: Fiscal Cliff Is Good for the US in the Long Run By Forrest Jones

The rapidly approaching fiscal cliff will benefit the country in the long run by wiping out complacency when it comes to managing the economy, said Nassim Taleb, the author and financial guru whose 2007 book “The Black Swan” predicted the current financial crisis.

In the long run, today’s uncertainty will lead to a more resilient economy tomorrow.

“For me, it is a good thing because the economy requires once in a while to be shaken and people to be scared. Otherwise we’ve got trouble, sort of like the equivalent of a forest that hasn’t had forest fire in a while,” Taleb told CNBC.

“You need once in a while to jolt the market so people realize that there is something wrong and we have to do something about it. And we need these fiscal cliffs and similar situations to shake politicians.”

“There’s some category of people who have the up side and no downside,” Taleb said.

“The downside is borne by us on April 15, tax day. We pay the bill.”


Source: Moneynews

http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/Tal ... /id/465814
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Re: Nassim Taleb

Postby winston » Wed Dec 11, 2013 8:11 am

Beyond “Sissy” Resilience: On Becoming Antifragile by Brett & Kate McKay

What’s the opposite of a person or organization that’s fragile?

If you ask most people this question, they’ll likely say “robust” or “resilient.” But philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say that’s not the right answer.

He argues that if fragile items break when exposed to stress, something that’s the opposite of fragile wouldn’t simply not break (thus staying the same) when put under pressure; rather, it should actually get stronger.

We don’t really have a word to describe such a person or organization, so Taleb created one: antifragile.

In his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Taleb convincingly argues that this powerful quality is essential for businesses, governments, and even individuals that wish to thrive in an increasingly complex and volatile world.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/12/0 ... tifragile/
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