yea black swans I don't understand all the hype over a theory that is so painfully obvious Everyone aknowledges that unforseen events are hard to time and can have drastic consequences..and some guy decides to write a whole book about it and people pretend like it something new
No, some guy bets real money that highly improbable events (think the type that are SUPPOSED to occur every 7000 years or so) occur much more often in the real world (4 to 7 years), and is repeatedly proven correct.
Thats because certain events that are goverend by human behavior don't usually follow knowns statistical distributions. Is there money to be made? Myabe but what if you are wrong and instead of every 10 years the black swan event happens in 20 years? A trader who is short will lose his shirt. The applications for this theory are hard to profit off of. You could have gone short before 1987 but if you did in 1985 you would have lost a lot of money leading up to the fall.