You are wrong: Taleb's thing is trying to taking advantage of the "fat tail" phenomenon... Which has been common knowledge for 20 years to everyone... Except Victor Niederhoffer and those world-class idiots at LTCM. Except for the tails which are rare events by definition... The markets are very close to normally distributed. Approximating any normal-like distribution implies strong randomness. The fact that very smart or very "inside" traders can find and exploit inefficiencies... Or that markets are often manipulated... Does not disprove the overwhelming randomness of the markets that confront the average investor. rm+
The more I look into this guy Taleb... The more he appears to be just another Cramer-type media/propaganda conglomerate. Can anyone link to some ** evidence ** that Taleb's fund has performed well since 2001. Volatility has been declining steadily for 4 years. Anyone steadily buying OTM options would have been pretty much wiped out. rm+
There is nothing more dangerous than common knowledge, not because an idea has been in use for 20 years it means it is accurate. Common knowledge doesn't make money in the markets. If markets were normally distributed that would mean that 68% of the data would be lie within 1 standard deviation, 95% within 2 standard deviations and 99% within 3 standard deviations. If you make a little counting you'll find out that this is not the case. I didn't like Taleb's book, I didn't buy his sound theories, I'm more inclined to believe in Niederhoffer's work which he shares with dummies like us in his dailyspeculations.com.
This quote is from someone else. Is it true? Does it matter? -Stephen __________________________________________________ Quote from ProfLogic: Tick bars used to be constant. Then a few months ago GLOBEX destroyed them by randonly grouping the transactions together rendering them all but useless for reading price accurately... __________________________________________________ http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showt...33594&highlight=tick+didnt+charts#post1033594