From http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm:
Taleb, by contrast, has constructed a trading philosophy predicated entirely on the existence of black swans. on the possibility of some random, unexpected event sweeping the markets. He never sells options, then. He only buys them. He's never the one who can lose a great deal of money if G.M. stock suddenly plunges. Nor does he ever bet on the market moving in one direction or another. That would require Taleb to assume that he understands the market, and he doesn't. He hasn't Warren Buffett's confidence. So he buys options on both sides, on the possibility of the market moving both up and down. And he doesn't bet on minor fluctuations in the market. Why bother? If everyone else is vastly underestimating the possibility of rare events, then an option on G.M. at, say, forty dollars is going to be undervalued. So Taleb buys out-of-the-money options by the truckload. He buys them for hundreds of different stocks, and if they expire before he gets to use them he simply buys more. Taleb doesn't even invest in stocks, not for Empirica and not for his own personal account. Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past. And who knows whether that will be true? So all of Taleb's personal wealth, and the hundreds of millions that Empirica has in reserve, is in Treasury bills. Few on Wall Street have taken the practice of buying options to such extremes. But if anything completely out of the ordinary happens to the stock market, if some random event sends a jolt through all of Wall Street and pushes G.M. to, say, twenty dollars, Nassim Taleb will not end up in a dowdy apartment in Athens. He will be rich.
25 Feburary 2008
Long time, no updates. System admin work is keeping me very busy.
I gave up on OpenBSD for now and moved back to Debian for my PPC systems. This is because I want to run SBCL which doesn't run under OpenBSD/PCC and I can't get the port to work. It's probably just something trivial, but I need to move forward now.
This requires me to quit using OpenBSD'd pf packet filter, which is tres cool, and go to NetFilter. So, for now, the Kid's windows system is not on the internet.
Finance
What if Black-Scholes is wrong? Well, Nassim Nicholas Taleb would probably say something like "how could it be right?".
Networks
MS Releases there protocol specs
Lisp
Lisp is good for the (semantic) web
Bruce O'Neel
Last modified: Thu Apr 5 13:42:07 MET 2007