0xDipper
@Dipper_pol • 4,797 subscribers
polymarket researcher | reading odds like morning news | @zscdao
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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 ↓
0xDipper1,400,908 просмотров • 22 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper1,238,186 просмотров • 22 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper184,552 просмотров • 4 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper407,734 просмотров • 9 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper441,585 просмотров • 10 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper241,166 просмотров • 6 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper197,431 просмотров • 5 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper195,065 просмотров • 5 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper692,554 просмотров • 20 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper536,457 просмотров • 21 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper370,533 просмотров • 15 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper187,858 просмотров • 8 дней назад
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.
0xDipper724,467 просмотров • 29 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper288,043 просмотров • 23 дней назад
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 ↓
0xDipper306,598 просмотров • 26 дней назад
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
0xDipper419,519 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Nassim Taleb's mentor proved Wall Street's math is a lie. Before black swans, Nassim Taleb had a teacher: Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. His finding was brutal - in the textbook model, a "10-sigma" crash should happen once in millions of millions of years. In real markets, those days keep showing up. Over the last 100 years, almost all the money was made and lost in about 10 days. The rest barely mattered. "Only the very few rare events count. The rest hardly counts at all." "The bell curve doesn't just understate market risk - its assumptions are absurd." "Great fortunes were made in very few days. Great ruins happened in very few days." ~80 min, free. the mathematician who proved markets are rougher than anyone admits ↓
0xDipper147,434 просмотров • 19 дней назад
Nassim Taleb: you don't need to predict the future. You need an option on it. Thales got mocked for being a poor philosopher, so he put tiny deposits on every olive press in town before the harvest - nothing lost if he was wrong, a fortune if he was right. "The opposite of fragile isn't robust. It's something that wants disorder - you write 'please mishandle' on the box." "Jump 10 meters and you die. Jump one meter ten times and nothing happens. That's fragility." "Convexity matters a lot more than knowledge - you can guess worse than random and still come out ahead." bookmark and watch it today - an hour on fat tails, antifragility, and how to position so randomness pays you ↓
0xDipper191,898 просмотров • 25 дней назад
Nassim Taleb explained why a banker collected $120M in bonuses - and you paid for it he calls it the Bob Rubin trade: take hidden risks that pay you for years, then when they blow up, the taxpayer eats the loss. no skin in the game. "You can't have the upside without bearing the downside yourself. You must own your own risk." "Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake." "When you're judged by reality, it's a completely different game than when you're judged by your peers." bookmark and watch it today - part 1 of an hour-long talk on risk, experts, and who actually knows what they're doing ↓ part 2 next: the minority rule, black swans, and why on day 28 you go bust - there is no day 29.
0xDipper174,605 просмотров • 27 дней назад
Nassim Taleb: the bigger something gets, the more fragile it becomes. Jump off a 1-meter ledge ten times - you're fine. Jump 10 meters once - you're dead. Size works the same way. One giant bank dumping €50B moved the market 12% and lost billions. Ten small banks dumping €5B each would've lost almost nothing. "An elephant breaks a leg when it falls. A mouse doesn't." "The best predictor of a company's bankruptcy is steady earnings." "Don't cross a river that's on average four feet deep." ~40 min, free. why small, jagged and distributed outlives big, smooth and centralized ↓
0xDipper137,289 просмотров • 24 дней назад