Has anyone read it? It’s come highly recommended to me but I am having a hard time staying interested in it. I know there have been a ton of book posts on here so I did a search and didn’t find anything. Thanks
Black Swan is an interesting read, though you can probably stop after chapter 2, unless you just want more entertaining stories (which are, for the most part, entertaining). I prefer Fooled by Randomness, which seems to give more insight into things the whole way through.
i had a hard time finishing it although there were a few chapters that really struck me. But it’s a must read… i am reading predictably irrational right now. Very entertaining…
Black Swan is a poster of dubious reputation.
^^ lol, indeed. as far as the book is concerned… i’m about half way through it, and so far so meh.
I was not very impressed with it.
It was one of my summer reading books last year. I liked it but I had to put it down for awhile. This year I actually have picked up the first non-finance book in years. Good, but I need to get back on track.
I agree with bchadwick’s post. Great idea but diminishing returns to reading the whole thing. Howard Marks hit the nail on the head when describing Taleb and Black Swan: “He’s an ex-hedge fund manager and self-styled philosopher whose books are nearly imprenetrable (I suspect intentionally).”
what’s black swan all about?
It’s about a swan that really wants to be normal, but everyone treats him as an outlier, so one day he gets a few of his fat tailed friends and they blow all the normal folks away and dominate the world. Now everyone is afraid of things called black swan events.
a black bird with a fat tail. Beyonce ,perhaps.?
here’s a podcast you can listen to, I myself have been meaning to read the book/listen to podcast, guess I have some time now! http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html
I’ve read both, and I liked “Fooled” better
If you totally believe his book, you would never sit for the CFA exam or think it was a worthwhile endeavor. CFA charterholders would probably be viewed as “so-called experts” who don’t really understand what’s going on. I’m pretty sure he would consider much of the quant stuff as garbage. The example that stuck in my mind is the turkey (the bird, not the person) who’s well fed every day until the day before thanksgiving. The turkey has no way to predict that he’s tomorrow’s dinner. Still, a very entertaining book.
aquabu Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > what’s black swan all about? As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don’t know We don’t know. Donald Rumsfield 2/12/02 the Black Swan is the unknown unkowns
Read both and liked both about equally. There was some overlap in general in terms of what he’s saying but they were different enough to both be worth reading. Highly recommend both. Has anyone read his book on options? I read some good reviews online but don’t personally know anyone who read it. I really like what he has to say about exposure to right-tail events vs left tail events, i.e. venture capital, OTM options. Somehow I think his ideas of portfolio construction (85% treasuries and 15% VC) won’t become standard fare on the CFA exams anytime soon.
can u guys submit the author name of black swan ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb “Don’t confuse falling off a cliff with flying”
I met Taleb last summer at a GS conference. I can’t stand him. I hadn’t read either of his books at the time and was given Black Swan, so I went out and bought Fooled so I could read that first. Fast forward a year and I’m 60 pages into Fooled. What I have read so far sums up his personality. It is completely condescending and academic. I couldn’t stand talking/listening to the guy and I can’t stand reading his work either. /rant
He does enjoy rileing people up, but he does have entertaining stories and analogies, so I cut him some slack for that.