Posts tagged as:

Taleb

The trade that broke the market's back

May 11, 2010

In a thoroughly ridiculous analysis, the WSJ is trying to pin Thursday's crash on a single options trade. Conveniently, the trade was made by Universa, the fund advised by black swan devotee Nassim Taleb. The body of the article uses phrases like "contributed" and "along with likely dozens of other trades", but the title's unanswered [...]

0 comments Read the whole post →

Things that keep me up at night: academics' websites

June 22, 2009

Why are academics' websites so poorly designed? In fact, they go beyond bad design and border on unuseable. Taleb's disasterous fooledbyrandomness.com epitomizes the phenomenon. One of the images is actually displayed upside down! Andrew has pointed out that my marquee example was not to be, but do not be distracted by the beautiful celebrities: Taleb's [...]

2 comments Read the whole post →

CNBC thinks Taleb is a bad trader

June 17, 2009

More on Taleb: CNBC is running a piece called "Swan Song: Why Nassim Taleb is Still Wrong." The crux of the argument seems to be this paragraph: Arguing against Taleb is a little embarrassing; who among us wants to side with the plodders when for the price of a paperback you can join the elect? [...]

0 comments Read the whole post →

Slow news day?

June 17, 2009

The WSJ is reporting today on Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel's new hyperinflation fund. It's basically the same story they reported two weeks ago when this news broke. And it's not a hyperinflation fund, anyway.

0 comments Read the whole post →

QOTD: anecdotal evidence edition

April 21, 2009

Few things bother me more than the use of random or one-off stories as evidence. Reasoning like that does absolutely nothing to sway me, and I'll probably just mumble something about Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. In a somewhat related post, Megan McArdle put it succinctly: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Brilliant.

0 comments Read the whole post →