Posts Tagged ‘ Black Swan ’

The black swans and Field of Dreams

January 19, 2012

  Yesterday I wrote about a white paper “Black Swans Turn Grey” from PwC. Here’s a footnote to that post. I had a good chuckle when I read about these “new black swan risks”. The authors suggest that all these unknown unknowns and unpredictable events are happening more frequently these days. This of course is not true. We are seeing the same sort of thing in the NHL with respect to concussions. For the longest time players have been getting concussions; the only difference is that now more players, coaches and people in the media are paying attention to them.…

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The iPhone 4S of enterprise risk management

January 18, 2012

  Last year Apple released the iPhone 4S and critics pointed out it was pretty much the iPhone 4 with a big-s glued on. Although there were some minor improvements from the iPhone 4, overall it was pretty much the same phone. After reading the ERM white paper “Black Swans Turn Grey” from PwC, it made me think that all the authors have done was glue a big-s to existing ERM frameworks. While they try to make it sound like they are proposing a new risk management approach, in fact this paper reads more like an indictment of the people…

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How to Make a Peanut Butter Sandwich: Nassim Taleb

January 17, 2012

A website dedicated to the popular show Lost published a post a while back about how each of the characters on the show would make a peanut butter and jam sandwich. I have borrowed this idea to illustrate how some finance or risk management professionals might make their own sandwich. In my first PBJ post, we look at how Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan might make a sandwich. This is intended to be jokes. How to Make a Peanut Butter Sandwich: Nassim Taleb 1. Complain that statisticians, mathematicians, physicists, financial analysts, Nobel prize winners cannot make a peanut…

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Voldemort vs Taleb Deathmatch

July 15, 2011

With all the hype surrounding the final Harry Potter movie, I thought I would compare Voldemort to Nassim Taleb, financial guru and author of the book “The Black Swan”, to see who is greater. (Plus I thought it might be funny.) (Removed a really good photo of Voldemort and Taleb) Place of Birth  Taleb: Amioun, Lebanon (winner) Voldemort: Little Hangleton, England Middle Name  Taleb: Nicholas Voldemort: Marvolo (winner) Father  Taleb: Doctor (winner) Voldemort: Muggle Languages       Taleb: English, French, Arabic Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Canaanite (winner) Voldemort: English and Parseltongue Academics Taleb: University of Paris and University of Pennsylvania (winner) Voldemort: Hogwarts…

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Boston Red Sox vs. Santa Monica Black Swan

June 16, 2011
Boston Red Sox vs. Santa Monica Black Swan

While researching for new reasons why Taleb is nuts, I came across this story about his former right-tailed man, Mark Spitznagel. This guy has managed to get 15 investors to ante a minimum of $50 million on a bet that they’ll clean up when the S&P falls 40%. So until then (whenever that is), he is expected to lose money every day in anticipation of that Black Swan event. This may be the best job ever. He sits in his Santa Monica office doing his downward-dog while being wrong 95% of the time. Can you imagine any other job where…

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Another great Taleb quote

February 3, 2011

Last October, I wrote a post explaining the top 5 reasons that Nassim Taleb is nuts. It garnered me much praise from the blogosphere, and surprisingly no financial reward. Today I get to share another fabulous quote by Mr. Taleb, famed for his book Black Swan about a concept he explained in 480 pages which Bazooka Joe could have explained to Pesty in a four frame comic. Incidentally, Taleb doesn’t provide the reader with any gum. At a conference in Russia, he expressed his displeasure in the US Dollar and preference for the Euro, despite the debt troubles of the PIIGS by explaining: “Euros have…

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Top 5 examples of why Taleb is nuts

October 22, 2010

Well maybe calling Taleb nuts is a strong word. Perhaps eccentric is better as ”nuts” may not be politically correct. But since Taleb is not politically correct at times, then let’s stick with nuts. Here are some quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb that proove my point, most of which can be found in this article called Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom from 2008 in the Sunday Times. #5 “Why do I go to church? …I love the smell of candles.” #4 “Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of…

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White swan vs black swan

July 29, 2010

I received a nice email from John Fraser the other day, thanking me spreading the good word about ERM through this website. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Fraser, he co-wrote what I consider to be the best 14 pages ever written about ERM: The Rise and Evolution of the Chief Risk Officer: Enterprise Risk Management at Hydro One. (And there are diagrams and big fonts so it’s actually less than 14 pages.) Mr. Fraser also recently wrote a book with Betty Simkins, Enterprise Risk Management: Today’s Leading Research and Best Practices for Tomorrow’s Executives. I have not read…

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Where are all the risk management jobs?

January 19, 2010

I’ve been writing this blog almost every day since August and I’ve been rewarded by your positive feedback and over 6000 hits. In this period, I’ve reported about many ERM-related events: the S&P calls ERM “highly important”; while others suggested ERM should be a “way of life”, called it “vital”, said it would be a great idea at some banks, and declared it is the “forth most influential management idea of the last decade”. It seems like lately everyone is talking about black swans. Additionally, Aon, actuaries and other authors published documents, surveys and books, the Government of Canada has…

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De-risk writes about Black Swans

December 12, 2009

I would like to introduce readers of  Riskczar.com to the De-risk blog. Have a read at this post about Nassim Talib’s The Black Swan and poke around his blog for some other great posts. In 2008, Nassim Nicholas Talib published a book called “The Black Swan”. A Black Swan is defined as being an event which has three characteristics; it is highly improbable, has massive impact and, in a strange way, appears almost inevitable after the event! Due no doubt to the timing of the book’s publication relative to world events, the term Black Swan has crept into business language.…

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