Quotes About Volatility

antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (favorable) equals likes volatility.

shows why the convex likes volatility. If you earn more than you lose from fluctuations, you want a lot of fluctuations.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

Uma das contingências da vida: não existe estabilidade sem volatilidade.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

b) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.

The dip in the market was not very large. It was just that his leverage was enormous.

Lembre-se da assimetria fundamental: o antifrágil beneficia-se com a volatilidade e a desordem; o frágil é prejudicado. Bem, tempo e desordem são a mesma coisa.

we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise.

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

they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility.

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.

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.

is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point.

emotions depended on how frequently he checked his portfolio.

in the event of its going down, it could go down a lot. Suddenly

Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them.

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

Instead of having medium risk, you have high risk on one side and no risk on the other.

Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm. And such antifragility-at-the-cost-of-fragility-of-others is hidden

the more nonlinear the response, the less relevant the average, and the more relevant the stability around such average.