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A comment on Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taught Retail Traders. Parent comment

Re:Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taugh... by conistonwater on Saturday January 17, 2015 @04:16PM (#8905549)
> I'm not picking on Nassim Taleb. He's a smart dude.

No, but you should pick on him, in a public-figure kind of way, I mean, not personally. He very publicly said (I paraphrase) "all macroeconomics is nonsense, you should short treasuries". His advice ran against solid macroeconomics and was demonstrably wrong. It wasn't just "dumb" advice, it was advice that deliberately ignored all sense and deliberately plumped for a dubious economic theory.

If I said something really stupid, I would expect to be called out on it. In general, I think, people would be better off if bullshit got called out.

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Re:Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taugh... by Tycho on Saturday January 17, 2015 @05:23PM (#8905754)
Just because it didn't come to pass, doesn't mean the risk wasn't real.
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Re:Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taugh... by conistonwater on Saturday January 17, 2015 @05:36PM (#8905805)
By that logic you can never prove any prediction wrong. I think you're setting the bar too low.
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Re:Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taugh... by Tycho on Saturday January 17, 2015 @06:32PM (#8905977)
“You have a very small probability of making money,” he said. “But if you’re right, you’ll never see a public plane again.” -Taleb, on shorting treasuries
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Re:Trading a Real Market: What the Swiss National Bank Taugh... by conistonwater on Saturday January 17, 2015 @08:25PM (#8906252)
Maybe not important, but in the video minimax linked to in another comment, he said that about buying far out of money options on precious metals to bet on hyperinflation happening, not shorting treasuries to bet on rising rates.
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