Most of his other books are just him bleeting on about how great he is and how I dont understand anything. When he was still a trader his writing was good. Now he's just a troll with a publisher.
Damn.. well everyone has different views. I actually enjoy all of his books. Theres not many books in the financial math realm that are as entertaining and unique like Talebs. I wouldn't say hes a troll... but he has the guts to call academia out on its bulllshit and I respect that. He's some Lebanese dude who struck it gold buying underpriced tails and has enough $ to live the rest of his life in leisure, being a flaneur.. I envy him just for accomplishing such tasks.
You can't understand volatility without knowing who Rob Engle is. He won the Nobel Prize for modeling vol. That's a nice attribute to have for oneself! He modeled the time-varying nature of return fluctuations, which is a characteristic of vol. Engle was first to use ARCH(auto-regressive conditional heteroscedasticity) model to capture this type of vol. What type? Volatility clustering. Financial asset returns are "lumpier" in contrast to the even variations of a normal distributed variable. With volatility clustering, a turbulent trading day tends to be followed by another turbulent trading day.(VOLBEGETSVOL) AUTOREGRESSIVE - because high/low vol tends to persist. CONDITIONAL - because its time-varying or with respect to time. HETEROSCEDASTICITY - non-constant volatility.
Long 15 Nov 19 26/29 call vertical @ $1.28 risk in $GDX Target is around the 10-month vol-val area around $27.8-28.5. Also most open interest is at the 28.5 strike in Nov, just sayin.. Also might go long $X calls or maybe even a covered call.. spot+ short the $12 or $13 call..although it has earnings on Halloween I think. Looking at several earnings trades I"ll note if I enter!
Been sick for the last three days, feel so lethargic, but feeling better each day! Just updating this journal. I liquidated the $GDX trade. Thursday nd Friday were lovely and price oscillated up to $28 for a profit of .32 cents!
$BAS had enormous volume on the 24th, not sure what caused that. I haven't opened anything yet. $BYND is sitting pretty on support, looking at long OTM calls or maybe verticalize it.