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Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
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Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Allen Lane
 Why all the negative reviews?, 2010-06-03
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
List Price: £10.97
Our Price: £7.24
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Random House Inc.
Why all the negative reviews?, 2010-06-03
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
List Price: £45.00
Our Price: £21.00
Author:
Jim Gatheral, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By John Wiley & Sons
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
Advanced derivatives modelling, 2009-05-01
Excellent toolbox for volatility modelling. Models are developped in a rigorous yet accessible way, while keeping an eye on how they are going to be used.
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £3.85
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Penguin
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
Why all the negative reviews?, 2010-06-03
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £3.60
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Penguin
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
Nice one, 2010-06-29
Really good book. Can definetely recommend it for anyone having the slightest interest in markets, and the random events that rule our life.
List Price: £19.99
Our Price: £10.26
Author:
Pablo Triana
By John Wiley & Sons
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
Why Nobel Prize Winners often fail in Real Life, 2009-09-05
Is Finance Theory an Oxymoron ?
The latest Occam's razor award goes to Her Majesty the Queen. In the unlikely surroundings of the London School of Economics, she last week cut to the quick. Describing the credit crunch as "awful", she tapped a gilded economist on the proverbial shoulder and asked: "Why did nobody notice?"
Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Wednesday 12 November 2008
It was reported that the gilded economist was at a loss for words. What he could have said was: "Your Majesty, may I suggest that you read `Lecturing Birds on Flying' or `Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets', by Pablo Triana.
This timely tome may not have all the answers, but it certainly can shed much light on why many seemingly sophisticated financial products turned out to have been poorly constructed. Triana shows how Nobel Prize winning Economists created brilliant theories that were based on assumptions from an ideal Platonic universe. The brilliance of the theories, as recognised by the "Nobel" Judges, obscured their less than realistic foundations.
A leading suspect was the use of the Gaussian Copula Model, more familiar to most people as the Normal Distribution or Bell Curve. It describes the distribution of many things in nature that are not interconnected; for instance the range of the heights of pupils in a class at school.
Pablo Triana, like Nassim Taleb, who wrote the foreword, believes that in the financial world it is highly likely that the data is distributed in a somewhat similar way to the Bell Curve in the centre but with far more outlier events than the Bell Curve would predict. Statisticians would say that the curve has fat tails. Taleb calls these outlier events `Black Swans'. Rather than a Normal Distribution a better representation of the Financial World may be a Levy Distribution, where a 99% confidence interval can shelter five or six Standard Deviations as opposed to less than three under a Normal Distribution.
With beautiful English understatement Paul Ormerod summed this up: "The record of economists in understanding and forecasting the economy at macro-level is not especially impressive". Even a study at INSEAD concluded, dryly: "Statistically complex methods do not necessarily produce more accurate forecasts".
The great danger, of course, is that the theories give some people an illusion of certainty of future outcomes, which they, and others, may find exceedingly expensive. LCTM is an example that springs to mind.
It could be said in defence of the theories that the Black Scholes Merton model is used all the time for Options pricing, so it must be correct. Or does the `volatility smile' suggest that in fact there is scope for financiers to adjust the formula to give the answers that the market would like ?
Surely so many Nobel Prize Winning Economists could not be wrong - but is there even really a Nobel Prize in Economics ?
One should always check one's assumptions ! Answer on Page 311.
List Price: £6.99
Our Price: £39.99
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Penguin
Nice one, 2010-06-29
Really good book. Can definetely recommend it for anyone having the slightest interest in markets, and the random events that rule our life.
List Price: £31.87
Our Price: £21.98
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Recorded Books
Why all the negative reviews?, 2010-06-03
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By Random House Trade
Why all the negative reviews?, 2010-06-03
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
List Price: £75.00
Our Price: £39.67
Author:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By John Wiley & Sons
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
If there is a better options trading book i'd love to see it, 2002-07-01
This is without a doubt the best book that has ever been written on professional options trading and I simply cant understand why anyone would give a less than glowing review. If there is anything better out there (and i dont mean a pricing book that leaves the reader to infer his own trading realities from the models and hedge ratios that ensue) then I'd love to see it.Of course this isnt a mathematically rigourous platform to learn the pricing and hedging of option products, Taleb is entirely clear that it wasnt meant to be. Instead it offers one source for a multitude of much, much more intuitive lessons on trading, probability, and market realties offered in a persistently thought provoking, even entertaining style. As a junior trader I found this a real bonus step up the learning curve (im sure you could realise all of this knowledge elsewhere, but in one place? - never.) I eagerly await seeing any additional material included in the second edition.
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