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This book is about luck -- or more precisely how we perceive and deal with luck in business and life.
Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill -- the world of trading -- Fooled by Randomness is a captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining and narrative style, the author succeeds in tackling and explaining three major intellectual issues: the problem of induction, the survivorship biases, and our genetic unfitness to the modern world.
The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: Yogi Berra, the baseball legend; Karl Popper, the philosopher of knowledge; Solon, the Ancient World's wisest man; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Ulysses. In addition we meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his trading life, but who also falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness.
But the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed -- the lucky fool in the right place at the right time. The embodiment of the ""Survival of the Least Fit."" Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru's insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained through chance. A monkey banging on a keyboard may eventually produce the Iliad, but would you sign him to write the sequel?
Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary?
Must we always try to uncover non-existent messages in random events?
It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the Goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared.

Taleb is a "quant," or mathematical trader, and an expert on financial derivatives who has made a name for himself in investing circles as a voluble critic of popular theories and conventional wisdom. He is also the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (1996). Taleb is fluent in seven languages and a reader of classical literature, an avocation that readily manifests itself in this meandering discourse on the roles of probability, luck, and risk in the markets and in life. Taleb examines how and why the attempt to determine cause and effect is continually hampered by random occurrences and our emotional responses to them. He freely shares his ideas and opinions, finding insights in the funeral of Jackie Onassis, B. F. Skinner's experiments on pigeons, Solon's warning, Karl Popper's work, George Soros, Darwinism, the O. J. Simpson trial, Pascal's wager, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, birthdays, taxicabs, and especially the works of ancient Greek philosophers.

David Rouse

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the founder of Empirica Capital LLC, a crisis-hunting hedge fund operator, and a fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has held a variety of derivative trading positions in New York and London and worked as an independent floor trader in Chicago. Taleb was inducted in February 2001 in the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame.
Taleb received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris Dauphine. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options(Wiley, 1997).