Nassim Taleb?

[Larson]

Quote from Martinghoul:

Erm, and your point is what?

As to betting against Taleb, I think his trading track record is quite well known.

My point is, for an intellectual he appears to have a good dose of common sense and is able to read markets.

 

[psytrade]

Add him to your facebook. He's got an entertaining page on facebook that he updates a few times a week.

 

[sle]

Quote from MAESTRO:
That is exactly what he is trying to say - "making sound economic predictions" is a fool's game!

Cheers,
MAESTRO

Well, it would appear that the market is consistently proving him wrong. That, or he is a much worse trader than he is a writer.

 

[Larson]

Quote from sle:

Well, it would appear that the market is consistently proving him wrong. That, or he is a much worse trader than he is a writer.

How so? Metals and agri are spot on currently.

 

[Martinghoul]

Quote from Larson:
How so? Metals and agri are spot on currently.

Firstly, you know what his actual trading track record is like? Secondly, what is a man who's supposedly not interested in making predictions doing predicting that metals and ags are going to outperform?

Point is that he used to be a relatively good academic with some interesting ideas. That didn't work out somehow. He then became a trader, which seemingly didn't work out either. So eventually he settled on being an author, a pundit and a media personality (with a particular "enfant terrible" schtick, which really grates on me). Whatever he does is good with me, but I'd much rather listen to people like Kahneman, Montier etc.

 

[jem]

Quote from Martinghoul:

Firstly, you know what his actual trading track record is like? Secondly, what is a man who's supposedly not interested in making predictions doing predicting that metals and ags are going to outperform?

Point is that he used to be a relatively good academic with some interesting ideas. That didn't work out somehow. He then became a trader, which seemingly didn't work out either. So eventually he settled on being an author, a pundit and a media personality (with a particular "enfant terrible" schtick, which really grates on me). Whatever he does is good with me, but I'd much rather listen to people like Kahneman, Montier etc.

well stated.

I think he got a lot of mileage out of something many traders understand. He also got many people on ET to think every result could be random. From multiple superbowl winners to generals with multiple victories.

Its funny, the guys selling vol and the guys buying vol seem to get preferable returns by being celebrities.

 

[MAESTRO]

Quote from sle:

Well, it would appear that the market is consistently proving him wrong. That, or he is a much worse trader than he is a writer.

"For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone"

Benoit Mandelbrot

 

[sle]

Quote from MAESTRO:

"For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone"

Benoit Mandelbrot

Yes, and chances are they are not going to be of interest to anyone ever at all (not in regards to BM, but most other things).

A typical issue with a lot of scientists is "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". NT has made "epistemology of randomness" a science somehow (as opposed to probability or statistics). Now he is using that hammer to prove his intellectual superiority and to make himself rich in the process.


PS. One of the key issues I got with him is his intellectual nihilism, but that's a subject for a separate discussion.

 

[badi]

Most of you people don't understand something very important about Nassim Taleb: there are two of him, Nassim the Trader and Nassim the Activist.

NNT The Activist is the one warning the world of disastrous Black Swans, which are the negative Black Swans.

NNT The Trader refuses to speak about his trading.

I don't know what exactly is in Taleb's portfolio but I am almost sure he doesn't bet only on Negative Black Swans, I think he is betting also on Positive Black Swans.

The problem with Negative Black Swans trading, or in other terms short selling fragile bubbles is that you never know if the bubble will burst first or it will double first.

I picked these quotes about Positive Black Swans, and they are very few in the book "The Black Swan".

"There are both positive and negative Black Swans.William Goldman was involved in the movies, a positive-Black Swan business. Uncertainty did occasionally pay off there."

and

"Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big."

and

Middlebrow thinkers sometimes make the analogy of such strategy with that of collecting "lottery tickets." It is plain wrong.
First, lottery tickets do not have a scalable payoff; there is a known upper limit to what they can deliver. The ludic fallacy applies here—the scalability of real-life payoffs compared to lottery ones
makes the payoff unlimited or of unknown limit.
Secondly, the lottery tickets have known rules and laboratory-style well-presented possibilities; here we do not know the rules and can benefit from this additional uncertainty, since it cannot hurt you and can only
benefit you.

So I developed the Positive Black Swan strategy which is not like buying lottery tickets, but it is about understanding the structure of uncertainty and buying cheap stocks accordingly, and like the example of books quoted above the losses are controllable and "for some reason" one of them might take off.

I have started a portfolio testing the strategy about one year ago and I have already over 40% growth check it here , the portfolio behaved as expected: there were losses and they were controllable and one stock experienced a Positive Black Swan and made over 1000% growth, and this is only one year after I started which is wonderful for a long term strategy.

Positive Black Swan trading is the only practical idea I extracted from "The Black Swan" when it comes to trading and benefiting from Black Swans.