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.
3 March 2008
Spoke too soon. Back to OpenBSD. Why? All because of pf. It's probably trivial, but, pf lets me control the way the kids PC talks to the internet all in one place. Netfilter (ipchains) on linux will, but, I have to add squid as well to do http filtering. Pf is just simplier.
Information Presentation
Visualizing Information for Advocacy. This applies to other fields as well, of course
Squeak
Squeak 3.9.1 is out. It's on the FTP site even if not yet featured on the web site.
Bruce O'Neel
Last modified: Thu Apr 5 13:42:07 MET 2007