Quotes About Risk

in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable

fragility—which had been lacking a technical definition—could be expressed as what does not like volatility, and that what does not like volatility does not like randomness, uncertainty, disorder

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.

Risk and ruin are different tings.

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns. Ten days in fifty years. Meanwhile, we are mired in chitchat.

because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

People are scared of the alternative.

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied

it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups—like

The hidden risk transfer is not limited to bankers and corporations.

lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don; the cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends.

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best.

By betting against fragility, they were antifragile.

Cualquier reducción del mundo que nos rodea puede tener unas consecuencias explosivas, ya que descarta algunas fuentes de incertidumbre, y nos empuja a malinterpretar el tejido del mundo.

Un hombre es honorable en proporción a los riesgos personales que asume por sus opiniones

emotions depended on how frequently he checked his portfolio.