A peculiar video on YouTube titled “Nassim Nicholas Taleb” and only coming with the vague description: “Tips on life from a man who’s done a lot of thinking and knows a lot of people.” It is not clear who this video is from, possibly Nassim himself but unlikely, probably more likely a friend/acquaintance. As he describes at the start it is filmed at Heathrow Airport Terminal, a place he often criticises for being terribly designed and over optimized, the planners obviously having no appreciation of the non-linear effects of congestion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan,” is about the power of randomness. Coincidentally, he was also the winner of Stephen’s Pull a Guest Out of a Hat Sweepstakes.
Paul Solman explains “hedge funds” and why “Black Swan” events make it harder than might be expected to reduce investment risk (October, 2006).
Transcript:
“Nassim: The difference between Hedge Funds, and Mutual Funds, is that Mutual Funds take your money and they have a lot of constraints on what they can do for you. A Hedge Fund has usually more freedom, to invest, to make bets, to gamble, to do whatever you want.
Paul: OK lets take it back to 2000, I have a lot of finance professor friends, so of whom would presumably go on my board. People know me on television as a financial somethingerather. Do you think I could have actually started a Hedge Fund?
Nassim: You would have billions under management currently.
Paul: I would have billions??
Nassim: Yes, because all you would had to do was go to university and pickup a couple professors ok, hire a couple risk managers–usually they have a foreign accent, you know they’re quants…
Paul: Quants??
Nassim: Quants, like me, my background is a quant.
Paul: [to the camera] Quants, as in quantitative types, so called financial engineers like Taleb, himself a mathematician, a Hedge Fund owner, and author of a steeply sceptical book on investing called Fooled by Randomness.
Nassim: All you had to do is provide these steady returns, or, the illusion of low-risk returns.”