This book is about luck disguised and perceived as non - luck and more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non - randomness. It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attribute his success to some other | About the author 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 MBA from the Wharton School and a . from University Paris-Dauphine. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options Wiley 1997 . Fooled RANDOMNESS The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB TEXE RE New York London CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments xiii Chapter Summaries xvii Prologue 1 Mosques in the Clouds 1 PART I Solon s Warning - Skewness Asymmetry Induction 7 One If You re So Rich Why Aren t You So Smart 11 Nero Tulip 11 Hit by Lightning 11 Temporary Sanity 12 Modus Operandi 14 No Work Ethics 16 There Are Always Secrets 17 John the High-Yield Trader 17 An Overpaid Hick 19 viii CONTENTS The Red-Hot Summer 21 Serotonin and Randomness 22 Tour Dentist Is Rich Very Rich _ 24 Two A Bizarre Accounting Method 26 Alternative History 26 Russian Roulette 27 An Even More Vicious Roulette 28 Smooth Peer Relations 29 Salvation Via Aeroflot 30 Solon Visits Regine s Night Club 32 George Will Is No Solon On Counterintuitive Truths 34 Humiliated in Debates 37 Risk Managers 38 Three A Mathematical Meditation on History 40 Europlayboy Mathematics 40 The Tools 41 Monte Carlo Mathematics 43 Fun in My Attic 45 Making History 45 Zorglubs Crowding the Attic 46 Denigration of History 47 The Stove Is Hot 48 My Solon 50 Distilled Thinking on Your PalmPilot 51 Breaking News 51 Shiller Redux 53 Gerontocracy 55 Philostratus in Monte Carlo On the Difference Between Noise and Information 56 Four Randomness Nonsense and the Scientific Intellectual 60 Randomness and the Verb 60 Reverse Turing Test 62 CONTENTS ix
