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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets | 
 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $5.90
You Save: $10.10 (63%)
New (52) Used (27) from $5.90
Rating:  392 reviews
Sales Rank: 1393
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2 Updated
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0812975219
Dewey Decimal Number: 123.3
EAN: 9780812975215
ASIN: 0812975219
Publication Date: August 23, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: clean w/ tight binding, some dogeared pages w/ very few light pencil notes, no other writing
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Amazon.com Review
If the prescriptions for getting rich that are outlined in books such as The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad are successful enough to make the books bestsellers, then one must ask, Why aren't there more millionaires? In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professional trader and mathematics professor, examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Part of what makes this book so good is Taleb's ability to make seemingly arcane mathematical concepts (at least to this reviewer) entirely relevant in evaluating and understanding everything from the stock market to the success of those millionaires cited in the aforementioned bestsellers. Here's an articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure that anyone who wants a little more of the former would do well to consider. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards
Product Description
“[Taleb is] Wall Street’s principal dissident. . . . [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church.”
–Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
Finally in paperback, the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about the markets and the world.This book is about luck: more precisely how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences.
Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of business–Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 387 more reviews...
This book will cause you to think! December 2, 2008
Jeff Bannister (South Carolina)
A great book. Read this, then follow up with the BLACK SWAN. I am more inclined to recommend this book for people who are self employed or investors. [.............]
 Does not deliver December 1, 2008
C. Landivar (Miami, FL USA)
The book sounds like it will give you some insight into the markets or the ramdomness of it. It builds on that expectation but does not deliver it slowly turns into a boring mumbuling of anecdotes. I did not finish the book and left it half way.
Good ideas, weak style November 25, 2008
boomdork (Lawrence, KS)
Interesting. Annoying. Self-referential. Insulting. Exasperating. Ultimately, intriguing. Taleb is smart, but an autodidact and quite full of himself. (After he lobs his tenth purely gratuitous insult, he is no longer cute -- he is merely sociopathic.) He gets a lot right, but he also plays fast and loose with schools of thought in which his understanding is strictly superficial. (And as with many autodidacts, he has trouble identifying which areas these might be -- making humility the mark of the really smart ones.) Like Descartes, whom he loathes, he is a rich guy who has the time and the means to ruminate with a wide swath of other intellectuals. This breadth offers bridges from ideas with which the reader is familiar into new and intriguing places. And on the pragmatic side, the reader can ask himself just what this guy does that might have saved us from loosing our collective shirts in the market.
 Book for our times November 23, 2008
Jack Sting
This book is great and should be a compulsory reading for everyone at college. Lots of people do not realize how much chances and coincidences play roles in our lives. This book is about learning to appreciate the vast number of variables in common life which are not controlled by anyone.
Fooled by Probabilities November 23, 2008
Kashyap Deorah (Mountain View, CA United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The ideas in this book have created more controversy than they deserve, and it might have something to do with the title of the book. Given the number of people who equate "random" with "equiprobable", "Fooled by Probabilities" would have been a more appropriate title for the book, though not as provocative as "Fooled by Randomness". There is a finite chance that there is a black cat in every dark room, but when you switch the light on, there is no black cat in the room. Both are correct statements - mathematically and practically. This book must be read in the same light.
It seems to me that the transition from an average to good investor (probabilistically speaking) happens as soon as you internalize the concept of expected values and invest by it. My favorite story from the book is where Taleb is asked which way the market is expected to go next week, and he says slightly up with a high probability (70%). Then someone intervened that Taleb had just made a big bet on the S&P going down next week, and he said that indeed he did. The one lesson this book teaches is that the two statements are not inconsistent with each other. 70% chance of a +1% change and 30% chance of a -10% change sums upto -2.3, a strongly negative expected value. Good investors always shadow the expected value (trend and magnitude), although market sentiments are always driven by either the expected trend of upward or downward movement, or expected magnitude of upward and downward movement.
Four key insights that I received from the book about how we all get fooled by probabilities in our everyday lives are the firehouse effect, survivorship bias, endowment effect and Wittgenstein's ruler. Firehouse effect is characterized by a clique of people with much downtime (firemen) who end up strongly agreeing with each other about things that would seem incorrect to any rational observer - something that many investors suffer from. The survivorship bias talks about exclusion of failures from "objective" after-the-fact performance studies - something that many business books suffer from. Endowment effect suggests that people value something more after they own it or get familiar with it - something that many businesses suffer from. Wittgenstein's ruler says that when an unreliable ruler is used to measure a table, the table is measuring the ruler and not the other way around. Reliability of the ruler determines what is being measured - something that consumer reviews and stock recommendations suffer from. For these and many such, read Fooled by Randomness.
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