NT's claim to fame is that he correctly pointed out that the Value at risk models assuming a normal distribution did NOT fit reality because of the fairly frequent occurance of events 4 or 5 standard deviations from the mean. In other words fat tails. He was right and I agree with his 10.
I would agree. I went looking for all kinds of things on institutional risk management afterwards, and found this interesting entry from a risk mgmt pro in Oz: Normal curves and the Levy distribution. The comments section eventually was taken over by some super-fanatical gold bug, but the original entry and some of the comments afterwards are quite good.
Why do people spend hours reviewing Consumer Reports and comparison shopping on an $800 refrigerator... But let others manage their $800,000 retirement and do their taxes for them? The advisors who took a 2 month course, and showed people how much money they would make 40 years from now, assuming a steady 8% market growth. No wonder Madoff lasted near 30 years.