Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am currently reading the first book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

A highly provocative book, which centered on financial businesses which are filled with overconfident brokers, displaying unscrupulous management of other people's money. He argues that the success of these people are mainly attributed by luck. They earn millions of dollars with multiplication of returns during good times, and those are not entirely due to their smart positioning and hedging of securities, they are just plain lucky.

In Russian Roulette, you have only 1 in 6 chance of getting killed by pulling the filled trigger. Imagine instead that this Russian Roulette now consist of 1000 packs with only 1 bullet. This is what happening in the financial institutions, you are successful because you just have not face the bullet yet for it is not as frequent, and when you do, there goes your career.

The success of the brokers earning millions of bucks is attributed by plain simple luck. They are just as likely to fail, when the right time comes.

This book is I think a prelude to the more successful Black Swan which I have not got my hands on. Hopefully I have time one day to dwell deeper into Mr Taleb's superb mind.