It's unfair of you to pick the first quote and ignore his mentioning that he worked in finance.

It's exactly like a random walk except that once in a while the walker gets teletransported.

>"If you think of the market as a "random walk" (a well defined mathematical concept)"

Random walk with a drift is how the trend is described.

Great. If you know a little tiny bit about finance then you know that stock prices are not a random walk (with drift or without). A random walk would give you a standard distribution. In reality you are dealing with a fat tail distribution.

So I should take financial advice from a random anonymous internet dude who doesn't understand quoting and can't spell "ouch"?

I said, "can think of", because you can think of it that way for the purposes of the point. I needed an easy phrase to convey the short-term twitching of the market. If you have a better phrase that sets up Taleb's point, go ahead and suggest it.