summary of the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb

Mediocristan is a land where everything is averaged and so unhelpful to the point of meaninglessness.

It’s what you haven’t read, what you do not know, that makes the difference.

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: he has 30,000 books.

It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than guess the shape of an ice cube by looking at a puddle.

Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything and embrace uncertainty.Their impact is huge, they are near impossible to predict, and yet afterwards we always try to rationalise them – an essentially pointless exercise.The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days before Christmas, assuming all is fine – then it is killed. Everyone assumed all swans were white until overseas travel revealed black ones – thousands of instances of one thing does not disprove the possibility of another. Black Swans (unpredictable events) disprove everything we think we know from time to time. I explain all of them and more in the video above.Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything, and embrace uncertainty There are a number of things you can do make sure your strategy becomes robust enough to survive a black swan. If you don't accept this, you're going to keep getting surprised when the 'impossible' happens. So you won't even know all the stuff you don't know! And in a complex system like the market, there tends to be a lot of those. And not only will there be unknowns, but there'll even be unknown unknowns. No matter how much you study markets, and how much you think you know, there are always going to be unknowns you have to deal with. The first thing you have to do is realize that your predictions and forecasts are not foolproof. But the question is, how can you prepare if these events are unpredictable? In markets, if you're not prepared for a black swan, you're going to end up losing a lot of money.

And third, after it happens everyone comes up with some explanation for it that makes it seem like it actually wasn't random and could have been predicted. There are three characteristics that define a black swan. So make sure to pay attention to this video you know how to correctly position yourself in the market.Ī black swan is a highly improbable event.

And you won't have to stay glued to your screen watching every tick in the market to do it either. You'll learn to avoid the pain and disgust that comes with those types of disasters. Once you understand this black swan concept you'll be able to protect yourself from the most dangerous market events - the type that wipe out people's life savings and force them to start over from zero. In this video, you'll learn about black swan theory, which the famous author and quant trader Nassim Taleb made popular.

Summary of the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb