[YouTube] Ellipticality (Technical)

Modern financial theory assumes that distributions are elliptical. We show what happens if the assumption doesn’t hold. And the assumption doesn’t hold.

Diversification does NOT reduce risks in the financial market; it causes near-certain long term blowups under any leverage.

[EndCoronavirus.Org] Town Hall discussion with Yaneer Bar-Yam

Nassim Taleb joins EndCoronavirus.org Founder, Yaneer Bar-Yam, for a Town Hall discussion.
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Never use Single-point Estimates for Pandemics

ERRORS 101
Never produce a point estimate for risk management, esp. in a fat-tailed domain, rather show statistical properties. Never judge a risk management stance from point forecasts.

[YouTube] On Warnings over Systemic Risks from Global Pandemics

Nassim Taleb, Universa Investment’s scientific advisor and distinguished professor of risk engineering at NYU, warned of an acute virus spreading throughout the planet in his 2007 book “The Black Swan.” In January, he also warned of the systemic risks of the coronavirus pandemic. He joins “Squawk Box” to discuss.

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[YouTube] Tutorial: Simple Trick to see the effect of Power Laws

A simple tutorial explaining how in the presence of power laws (with low exponent) most of the body of the distribution becomes noise. Once you establish that a variable is in the power-law class, some necessary consequences come out. To debunk that history is dominated by tail events, you must show it does not follow a power law.

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Nassim Taleb’s Probability Moocs: The empirical distribution is … not empirical

For fat tailed distributions, the empirical distributions does not reflect the true statistical properties, particularly for extremes. This is a simplified side note to a paper with Mark Spitznagel on why people make a mistake by looking at raw historical data as “empiricism”.

So I am fed up with academics who say “we know it is fat tails” yet not understand the consequences.

Randomness of Correlation & Its Hacking by Big Dataists


This tutorial presents the intuitions of the randomness of sample correlation (spurious correlation) and the methodologies in derivations. Some later sections are somewhat technical as Nassim rederived an old equation with more precise functions (in order to apply to fat tails) and showed the distribution of the maximum of d variables with n points per variable.
This paves the way to the real scientific work on random matric theory under fat tails and the failure of Marchenko-Pastur.