I blogged about our deficits in predicting the future the other day and mentioned not only our tendency to compare the present to the past, but also how we tend to get history wrong—by neglecting the impact that accidents and chance had on them. Isn’t our place in history today…
It’s not so easy to be active in the stock market. Because when people I meet learn that I make my money predominantly from the abundant stock market, they—more often than not—flood me with questions on my prediction of the future trends and…
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. Some things are fragile—they don’t like chaos, while others are robust—they don’t care if things are crazy. Antifragility is beyond…
A first on my blog! I am re-publishing an article, just because it is such an outstanding piece of work containing so much, more or less, obvious truths: What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should…
In my earlier blog post, I asked which animal kills more people? Despite that the Hippopotamus emerged victorious; in truth, the animal that creates by far the greatest havoc to humankind is the Black Swan. How so? Because the most influential and devastating events in history…
Schwager takes aim at the most perniciously pervasive academic precepts, money management canards, market myths, and investor errors. Like so many ducks in a shooting gallery, Schwager picks them off, one at a time, revealing the truth about many of…
The tendency to find order to ambiguous stimuli is built into the cognitive machinery we use to understand the world. That predisposition to impose order can be so automatic and so unchecked that we often end up believing in the…
Two main subjects: Why markets for goods and services tend toward equilibrium, but financial markets do not. Why central banks are useful and what they should do (which they currently don’t). Breaking the 170 page book into nine chapters, Cooper…
This is clinging to a fact or figure that should have no bearing on your decision. Often, we use an initial value or first piece of informationa as a “starting point” in decision making. Even if the initial value was…
Also known as the “I knew it all along” effect. Hindsight bias refers to our tendency to take facts now known and interpret them in a way that explains past events. In retrospect everything seems clear and inevitable. This is a…