0xDipper
@Dipper_pol • 5,875 subscribers
Researcher AI x finance. builders and legends, in their own words @zscdao
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ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs just explained how he spotted the 2008 crisis from a movie theater on his BlackBerry "something moved 6% that was only supposed to move 4 basis points - I said excuse me I have to go to the bathroom - and started making calls" "I don't care what you think is going to happen - I only want to know what could possibly happen - even with low probability - and what we're doing about it" "we were very good contingency planners - when that remote contingency happens you get off the block so quickly people think you anticipated the gun - we just heard it and acted quicker" bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper656,837 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
Nassim Taleb sat down with Daniel Kahneman - two of the sharpest minds on risk ever - and the takeaway was blunt: stop trying to be smart Kahneman's prospect theory explains why almost nobody can do what Taleb does We're wired to hate the steady trickle of small losses his strategy needs - even when one huge win more than pays for all of them So you structure it the other way: tiny safe bets plus a few wild ones, never the comfortable middle. "You'd rather be antifragile than intelligent - any time." "Trial and error is really just trial with small error." "Make your gains in small bites. Take your losses all at once." ~1 hr, free. two legends on risk, prediction, and how to win without forecasting ↓
0xDipper1,411,472 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Daniel Kahneman - the psychologist who won a Nobel in economics - spent his life proving one thing: your confidence is lying to you A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. The answer "10 cents" jumps to mind instantly. It's wrong (it's 5 cents) - and ~50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton say it without checking. That gap is his whole point: the fast, intuitive mind builds a clean story from almost nothing, and the feeling of certainty has nothing to do with being right. "Confidence is a feeling, not a judgment." "Stock pickers can't develop intuition - there isn't enough regularity for it to form." "You can build a very coherent story out of very little information." ~45 min, free. how your mind fools you - from a man who studied it for 50 years ↓
0xDipper1,244,499 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Nassim Taleb: the richest man in the Roman Empire woke up every morning pretending he was poor. Seneca had more to lose than to gain from his wealth - so he rehearsed losing it. Every so often he'd live on bread and water as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside familiar and harmless. That's the whole game, Taleb says: arrange your life so you have far more upside than downside - then randomness stops scaring you. "Make more when you're right than you lose when you're wrong - that's antifragile." "Always keep more upside than downside from random events." "The Stoics aren't unmoved by the world - only by bad events." ~70 min, free. the oldest trick for surviving a world you can't predict ↓
0xDipper698,867 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Jim Chanos called Enron before it collapsed - by reading the one page everyone skipped. now he says the same trick is hiding in plain sight again. the trick: in a spending boom, one dollar gets counted twice. booked as profit by the company selling the gear - quietly depreciated by the one buying it. earnings look unstoppable… until the spending stops. his receipt: S&P 500 earnings rose ~30% into 2000, then cratered ~40% in twelve months. no recession did that. the telecom buildout just froze - firms had ordered 10,000 routers and needed 2,000. he says the AI infrastructure boom runs on identical mechanics. ~20-min interview, free. the man who saw Enron in the footnotes on how every boom hides its own bust ↓
0xDipper433,959 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb: pick two people at random If their combined height is 4.1m, it's basically 2.05 + 2.05. If their combined wealth is $36M, it's almost never 18 + 18 - it's ~$1,000 and ~$36M. Height lives in "Mediocristan," where the average tells you everything. Wealth - and markets - live in "Extremistan," where one event dominates the whole picture. Ruin there never comes from a string of bad days. It comes from a single one. ~1hr lecture, free. The Black Swan author at Cambridge on why the statistics you were taught break exactly where it matters. Being right on average means nothing if one tail empties the account.
0xDipper727,078 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Daniel Kahneman: the day Saddam Hussein was captured, the same news "explained" both the bond market going up and going down. Treasuries rose - Bloomberg's headline said the capture made the world safer. Half an hour later treasuries fell -the new headline said the capture boosted appetite for risk. Same event, opposite stories. The market moved first; the pundits reverse-engineered a reason. That, he says, is how financial commentary actually works. "Our confidence comes from the coherence of the story - not the evidence behind it." "The conclusion comes first. Then we believe the arguments that support it." "System 1 is largely indifferent to the quality and amount of evidence." ~55 min, free. why the market's "explanations" are stories told after the fact ↓
0xDipper545,244 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Taleb: the worst single-day loss in market history was "a small setback." Nvidia shed $589B in a day on the DeepSeek scare - the biggest one-day wipeout ever. his take: that's noise. the stock was up an order of magnitude. giving back 17% means nothing. the real lesson - the whole AI trade leaned on one chip, one story. and people only notice the falls, never the rises. "Something goes from 1 to 10, goes back to 9, people freak out." "now it's no longer flawless. You have a small little chip on the glass." "Google came out of nowhere and displaced Alta Vista." ~4 min, Taleb on why the crash is "the beginning," not the bottom ↓
0xDipper446,192 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Taleb: "standard deviation is not how much something moves on average." ask anyone - even statisticians, even government agencies - and that's exactly the wrong definition you'll get back. what they're describing is mean absolute deviation. real standard deviation squares the moves first - which quietly hands almost all the weight to the rare extremes. his demo: 1,000,000 numbers, all zero except one. mean deviation ≈ 2. standard deviation ≈ 1,000. same data, a 500× gap. ~10 min, free. why the risk metric everyone trusts falls apart on fat tails ↓
0xDipper412,623 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb on the AI selloff: the pioneers usually aren't the winners. They're more likely to be the losers. He's not betting against AI - someone will make a fortune on the software and hardware. His point is it doesn't have to be today's hot names. History rhymes: the early car makers, the early airlines, the early PC makers mostly got wiped out. His call is blunt: expect bankruptcies in the software space, and much of a rally built on a handful of names getting erased. "The pioneers are not necessarily the winners - they're probably more likely to be the losers." "A lot of the gains in the stock market are going to be eradicated." "Forget current volatility - it's not representative of the real risk we're facing." ~8 min, free. the man who bet on the last crash on where the AI trade actually goes wrong ↓
0xDipper373,237 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Nassim Taleb on a bet most people would take: 70% chance to win $1, 30% chance to lose $1 - should you bet? His answer: in most cases no. Not because of risk aversion. Because it's a bad strategy in multi-period reality Same Kelly Criterion math that powers Shannon's information theory - there's a sweet spot, and most behavioral finance papers ignore it Bet too much and the law of large numbers ruins you. Bet too little and you leave returns on the table this is what every quant learns before they touch capital
0xDipper420,966 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Nassim Taleb breaks down the Black-Scholes formula - and the story he tells starts with a forgotten man. Louis Bachelier priced options 73 years before Black-Scholes - and modeled Brownian motion 5 years before Einstein. it was 1900. a 30-year-old Frenchman defends a thesis under Henri Poincaré that quietly invents two fields at once: the math of random markets, and the first real formula for pricing options. his reward? the committee marks it down - "too much finance." no top grade, no patron, no career. he spends his life applying for jobs one rank below what his work deserved, and dies forgotten in 1946. then 1973: Black, Scholes & Merton publish the option-pricing formula. it reshapes Wall Street and wins the 1997 Nobel - for two of them (Black had died, so missed it). almost nobody remembers the Frenchman who got there first. and here's Taleb's twist: traders never actually use Black-Scholes. what the market runs on is a version of Bachelier's original. the Nobel, he argues, wasn't even for the pricing - it was for dressing it up to fit the economic theory of the day. ~15-min lecture, free. the man who built modern finance — and watched the credit go to everyone but him ↓
0xDipper245,386 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb asked a room full of quants: to trust an average, a normal bell curve needs ~30 data points. how many does an 80/20 "fat-tailed" world need? people guessed 200. 1,000. the real answer: 100 trillion. that's 10¹⁴ - because in fat-tailed data, one rare event dwarfs everything else, and until it shows up your sample is a lie. "you observe, you observe, you observe… until the crash." worse, the deception only runs one way. a wild distribution can disguise itself as calm - a calm one can't fake being wild. so the data almost always fools you downward, into thinking there's less risk than there is. the fix: stop estimating the average from the average. it doesn't work where it matters. ~25-min talk, free. Taleb on why your data is quietly lying about risk ↓
0xDipper203,816 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb: 0.3% of Americans keep kosher. Nearly 100% of drinks in America are kosher anyway. that's the minority rule - a small, intransigent group decides what everyone gets, because the rest don't mind either way. it quietly runs markets, ethics and elections. "If you're bust on day 28, there is no day 29." "Being paranoid isn't irrational. If we weren't paranoid, we wouldn't be here." "Whatever your grandmother tells you is Lindy - it survived the test of time. Most of what psychologists 'discover' won't." bookmark and watch it today - part 2 on minority rule, black swans, and surviving randomness ↓
0xDipper307,540 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Nassim Taleb helps run one of the most famous crash funds on earth. His edge: having no idea what's coming He and Spitznagel buy far out-of-the-money options non-stop, regardless of the news. They never forecast the crash - they just stay positioned so one shock pays for years of small losses ~10% a year in normal times. ~3,700% in a single crisis month "We have absolutely no notion of the future. We just buy the options." "If you have a reason in mind to buy an option, don't - it'll already be priced in." "Up the escalator, down the elevator." ~25 min, free. how the world's most famous crash-trader actually makes money ↓
0xDipper291,215 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Andrew Lo, MIT - the economist behind the "physics envy" critique of finance - on the most dangerous instinct investors have: every time NASCAR adds a new safety feature - reinforced bumpers, roll bars - drivers crash more, not less. they feel protected, so they push harder. economists call it the Peltzman effect: make people safer and they spend the safety on extra risk. now apply it to markets. when volatility is low, investors don't sit still feeling safe - they pile on leverage and risk, convinced the danger is gone. the risk didn't vanish. they just stopped seeing it. his warning: the calmest markets are exactly where people quietly load up on the most hidden risk - right before it snaps back. ~50-min Google talk, free. the MIT economist on why "safer" quietly makes us reckless ↓
0xDipper200,551 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Mark Spitznagel - founder of Universa, the "black swan" fund Nassim Taleb advises - on the most counterintuitive idea in investing: add a 3% sliver of crash insurance to a stock portfolio. give that insurance a 0% expected return - it makes nothing over time. it still raises the portfolio's long-run compound return - by roughly what you'd get from putting that same 3% into an asset returning 20%+ a year. how? by killing the deep drawdowns that quietly destroy compounding. but the insurance has to actually fire in a crash. one that only sometimes pays out is "like a parachute that only sometimes deploys - you're better off not wearing one." most "safe havens" - gold, the dollar, hedge funds, even a Picasso - fail that test. ~13-min talk, free. the man who made ~4,000% in the 2020 crash, on what actually protects you ↓
0xDipper199,042 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb ran a simple test: take two completely random, unrelated columns of numbers - noise, nothing else - and measure their correlation. with a small sample, you'll routinely see correlations of 0.4, 0.6, even higher. from pure randomness. now the trap. give a researcher many variables and few data points - say 38 variables, 18 points each, which he says is far more common than you'd think - and let them hunt for the highest correlation. they'll always find a "strong" one. it means nothing. it's just the max of a pile of noise. "when you hear the word correlation, be suspicious." by his estimate, about half of published research is nonsense for exactly this reason. ~14-min talk, free. Taleb on the number that fools almost everyone ↓
0xDipper174,392 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Nassim Taleb on Bitcoin, in his own words: "a business that will never make any money - and its only value is what you can sell it for to someone else." a Ponzi has no absorbing barrier. this does. "the minute it reaches a plateau, it's dead." gold doesn't die. you leave it in the dirt, it's still gold. "the only thing that is infallible is a deity." so if it can't fail - that's theology, not finance. ~13-min talk, free ↓
0xDipper186,555 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry: a 10-sigma market crash has odds of roughly 1 in Avogadro's number. by the Gaussian math taught in every business school, it simply can't happen. "It should never happen. It happens every day, somewhere, to somebody." October '87? a 23-sigma day. and 10-sigma moves, he says, are "all over the place." his verdict on the Gaussian risk model taught in every business school: "sheer idiocy." ~70-min lecture, free. the mathematician Taleb calls his master, on why markets break the math ↓
0xDipper189,926 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat