Quotes About Risk

or "what are the ten best books

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future—but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

the Black Swan is not just about the occurrence of some event but also about its depth and consequences.)

se você não assumir riscos, não há nada que possa fazer para tornar-se grande, nada.

So, Nero switched careers to what is called proprietary trading.

In these professions, no matter how highly paid, your income is subject to gravity.

exposure is more important than knowledge;

They would prefer a defective forecast to nothing.

The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider

In other words, it will not be Black Swan driven.

an employee is also a risk-management strategy.

major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door.

The original Aramaic version had a wild ass, instead of a wolf, showing off his freedom. But the wild ass ends up eaten by the lion. Freedom entails risks—real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.

this avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other.

There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent—and most conspicuous—and that is the world of markets. By

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is.

the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

Wouldn't that be stifling?

When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don't look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. Those who distract us increase the risk of Black Swans.

In the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.