Taleb - the new sage of Wall Street

Re:Taleb - the new sage of Wall Street | by timr on Monday October 06, 2008 @02:08PM (#325152)

I generally agree with you (I find Taleb's writing to be incoherent and his arguments overwrought), but I think his point is still relevant: if you make your wealth through financial tricks that work moderately well 99.99% of the time, but fail catastrophically .01% of the time, you've got to plan on failing in a catastrophic way. For whatever reason, most Wall St. guys don't seem to think that way.

Point being, you don't need to predict the improbable event; you just need to be aware that it's eventually going to happen, and plan appropriately.

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Re:Taleb - the new sage of Wall Street | by mynameishere on Monday October 06, 2008 @02:34PM (#325176)

plan appropriately

Sure. Did you know that on the big stock market drop a couple weeks back, only one company in the s&p 500 went up?

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/new-money/2008/9/30/campbells-so...

if you have no confidence in your banking system and no confidence in the financial markets, the only thing you can have confidence in is the ability to build a bunker

That is the only way to provide against the vast bulk of "black swans". A bunker with plenty of canned goods. And that fact got priced into the market instantly. Even if it amounted to a sort of joke...

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Re:Taleb - the new sage of Wall Street | by timr on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @04:53AM (#325558)

You're being extremely cynical.

The point is not that you (probably) lost money in last week's market; the point is that you didn't go bust. The guys that Taleb is talking about put it all on the line, discounted the possibility that this sort of thing could happen, and now they're dead.

Like I said: I don't like Taleb's writing, but I don't think the message is particularly bad.

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