Books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Study Guide) - The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Dynamic Hedging (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Dynamic Hedging. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book about randomness and uncertainty, by the epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb, bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness, treats uncertainty and randomness as a single idea. See Black Swan Theory for Taleb's definition of a Black Swan Event. As of March 2009 according to Slate, The Black Swan sold close to 1.5 million copies. It also spent seventeen weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was translated into twenty-seven languages. The impressive sales of Taleb's first two books garnered an advance of $4 million for a follow-up, tentatively titled Tinkering. The main idea in Taleb's book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan Events, but to build robustness into negative ones that occur and being able to exploit positive ones. Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are very vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan Events and are exposed to losses beyond those that are predicted by their defective models. Taleb states that a Black Swan Event depends on the observerusing a simple example, what may be a Black Swan surprise for a turkey is not a Black Swan surprise for its butcherhence the objective should be to "avoid being the turkey" by identifying areas of vulnerability in order to "turn the Black Swans white." Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to the book variously as an essay or a narrative with one single idea: "our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly large deviations." It is Taleb's questioning of why this occurs and his explanations of it that drive the book forward. The book's layout follows "a simple logic" moving from literary subjects...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=856125