Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. This book is a thorough dissertation by someone that has a legendary capacity to predict outcomes in the financial markets where seemingly everyone involved in the system has become ‘fooled by randomness’.Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don't understand. It is impossible to predict when a previously stable system will change to operate under a different set of rules resulting in a regime switch sometimes resulting in chaotic and unpredictable behaviour. Selection bias is when we try to predict future events from past paths of success while ignoring all the paths of failure and thereby ignoring the risks. It explains how patterns become relied on as a manifestation of some underlying truth, but that they are actually the operation of processes such as path dependence (things happen because of constraints created in the past). This book explains how randomness operates at a deep level in all our lives. He is most definitely the person to listen to about probability and risk. He mentioned on Twitter prior to the Brexit vote that gold might be a good option and it increased against the pound by 20% overnight.Ī hedge fund he advises made a 3,600% in one month when the pandemic hit.

He has a huge following from all students of probability and risk (including me) and could easily move markets with a single comment should he choose to do so. Taleb is well known for having predicted, and so profited from massively, a number of critical events such as Black Monday (a day when the stock market crashed in 1987 costing most investors a fortune). When I read Fooled by Randomness the width of the book had grown appreciably as I had turned over so many corners.

Whenever I get a physical book and find anything of value in it I turn over the corner of the page. A key book to understand the nature of change.

Fooled by randomness review