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Had Nassim Taleb been born in any other period, he would have certainly been put to death.
~ Carine Chichereau, co-translator of TBS.

Black Swan and Nassim Taleb - Listened to Nassim Taleb on KQED's Forum program, and the ideas about randomness and luck drove me to his recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

A read it once, then started over, this time going a bit slower, trying to commune with his counter-intuitive ideas and wonderfully illustrative thought experiments. This books is such a colorful pallet of ideas that somehow connect without falling into a grand theory or trite advice. Indeed, that's part of the Taleb's message in The Black Swan. That theories are contrived and can lead us to a false sense of security or doom. Skeptical empiricism reigns over theory, narrative, and other often misguided simplifications.

One thing Taleb suggests is to invest most of your money in safe stuff (U.S. Government bonds). But realize that the big growth is found in the unexpected, not in "medium risk" investments (e.g., stock index). To take advantage of this, Taleb suggests you take a small precentage of your long-term savings and put it in HIGH risk stuff (derivatives, stocks, etc.). That way you are a participant in what you can't predict. Your biggest gains will be in those black swans, those rare and unpredictable events.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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