Friday, April 27, 2012

Beyond Black Swans - About Fragility

I recently saw a video of Nassim Taleb giving a talk in Princeton, discussing his new ideas about fragility, risk, probabilities and future events.   These ideas are the basis of his upcoming book, Antifragility.

I specially liked the approach he discusses to "predicting" the future. Although the majority of us know that the future can not be predicted, Taleb's approach was to identify the things that would not exist in the future, instead of identifying what things would be there.  For Taleb, things that will not exist in the future have fragility, or have a low probability of withstanding future events.  For example, he predicts that most banks nor the FED will exist in their current form, because of their fragility.

Taleb has always been a controversial speaker, bu his insights from the stock market have helped people in the business world to think about risk in a different way.

How are you protecting yourself from Black Swans?  Are you in a position to benefit from them, in case they appear?

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