Friday the 13th Black Swan
By Barry Ritholtz - February 13th, 2009, 12:30PM
>
What could be a more appropriate thing to do on Friday the 13th than have lunch with Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan author Nassim Taleb?
I am looking forward to an interesting meal . . . (apologies for the shameless name dropping)
>
UPDATE: February (Friday the) 13th, 2009
Fascinating lunch — he is a very interesting guy. We dislike many of the same people, institutes, and Nobel price winners.
The funniest thing is that there were 3 of us having lunch– 3 big old bears in midtown NYC — and we probably were the loudest and had the most fun of any table in the joint.
(Our table also used the word Fuck more than all the other tables combined.)
>
February 13th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Reinhardt! Just Kidding (http://www.enterprisecorruption.com/)
February 13th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I’ll have the duck, please..
February 13th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Mr. Ritholtz-
The guy muttering to himself by the door to the kitchen. That’s me, eating a huge piece of jealousy pie, no ice cream, it’s burnt on the bottom, and tastes like 8 years of Bush.
What? Are you shooting hoops with Michael Jordan on Sunday?
February 13th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Shameless name-dropper… NNT’s going to tell everyone he was hanging out with BR.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Hopefully hes more tolerable in person.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
must be nice to just have some lunch with him, you lucky bastard.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
This whole black swan thing is out of control. Now everything is black swan.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Maybe you’ll have some black swan for lunch?
February 13th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Please ask him how he thinks the bailouts and pork from Washington interupted his swan dive?
February 13th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
“Nobel price winners”: yep, bought and sold.
February 13th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Don’t be a Taleb Tease! Give us more details!
.
February 13th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I think he’ll enjoy it too; probably find it refreshing to talk with someone who won’t be asking him stupid questions for a change.
February 13th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Did you ask him for stock tips
…………..
For those who don’t know let me recommend his fooledbyrandomness.com site. Not your average website. I especially like his footnotes.
By the way Taleb eats “according” to evolutionary fitness (except for his love of mozzarella) – see arthurdevany.com for more about evolutionary fitness.
February 13th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Hey, you cant say fuck on here. Please edit that.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Liberal use of the F-word probably just made them think you were dining with Christian Bale.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
I-Man: He meant to say duck. I think they all got wasted, more fun than today’s market, I would say.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
You had lunch? I’m jealous
Signed,
Average American in about a year
I hope you at least snuck a camcorder in and will be posting the wisdom later
February 13th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Tried to read that book twice but fell asleep both times; finally gave up never making it past page 54. A better writer could have encapsulated the whole notion in 3, single-spaced pages (maybe 5 at most) with another 2 for examples.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Did you record the lunch Barry with a digital video recorder? So that it can be posted to youtube.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Why wasn’t Nouriel there?
As much as I agree with Nassim and BR, I don’t tolerate swearers in confined dining spaces well, and would have given you two an earful before I backed it up physically. If more ‘average guys’ had balls, loud foul mouths would realize theirs are made of glass.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
BR, be careful when you advertise that you are a “Big Old Bear.”
You might attract a different fan base than you expect.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Black Swan is a misnomer. Fortunate events have an even lower probability in a truly random scenario. However, a market or financial system crashed by the preponderance of CROOKS is entirely predictable. Thanks a lot, traders.
This is part of an article explaining trader philosophy from Common Dreams:
Just a few years ago, however, the bonus cognoscenti at Trader Monthly depicted Mr. Thain as something of a piker. In an article that began with the sentence, “What, did somebody forget a zero?” they sneered at Mr. Thain’s “reported compensation,” which they claimed was $6 million for 2006, back when he was CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.
What was $6 million in those days? Remember, 2006 was the year of “the Biggest Bulge Ever,” as the magazine tastefully put it, when “the bonus pool increased to a size almost beyond comprehension.” That was the year that Goldman Sachs famously distributed $16.5 billion to its employees, and if you were one of the lucky ones, Trader Monthly — “See It, Make It, Spend It,” was its slogan — stood ready to help you figure out how to blow your share properly, conspicuously, flamboyantly.
Oh, there were cars: Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis, sometimes described in the magazine’s characteristic tone of flippant indulgence. There were airplanes, reviewed and rated in a column specifically dedicated to that purpose.
There were Scotches, including, in the “Bonus Guide” for 2008, a $20,000 bottle of Johnnie Walker. There were watches, mechanical ones of course, and among the most desirable were the ones with transparent faces, presumably so the little gears were visible and everyone knew the timepiece was for real.
Reading through back issues of the magazine, which was published in Europe with distribution help from The Wall Street Journal Europe, one does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point in its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as “a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home.”
If you didn’t understand why someone would want to greet their guests in such a way — and as a nation we certainly didn’t — then you didn’t understand what it meant to be a trader.
Do the world a favor. Put a trader in the poor house.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
The “Fuck Usage Frequency” tends to be an extraordinarily accurate predictor of current “coolness” levels…
P.S Taleb is the isht!!!
February 13th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
BTW Marc Faber is interviewed at Financial Sense Online this weekend…
http://www.financialsense.com/fsn/main.html
February 14th, 2009 at 9:06 am
guru:
> A better writer could have encapsulated the whole notion in 3, single-spaced pages
IMO, most business books are like that. A great idea or commentary that can be described in less than ten pages, plus another hundred or so pages of mind-numbing repetition in order to bring the page count up.
_Blink_ was a perfect example of that, as was _Execution_.
February 14th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Or better yet, two words: “Shit happens.”
February 15th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Taleb once constructed a narrative, titled “The Black Swan.” The central thesis of the book was borrowed from Monty Python, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Somebody on Wall Street read a review by a guy who read the first five pages and decided that;
“The Golden Goose (CDO’s) turned into a Black Swan. Who knew?”
It wasn’t a black swan it was Heisenberg Uncertainty – You can’t measure the value of a CDO without (adversely) affecting its value.