Source? Cause the article above says the exact opposite. Not sure if that's why you're bringing it up: In 1986, Taleb moved to First Boston Inc. (now part of Credit Suisse Group), where fellow traders called him “Nassim the Dream,” recalls Demetrios Diakolios, a former colleague. At First Boston, Taleb, then 28, built what he terms a “massive” position in out-of-the-money calls on Eurodollar futures. ‘He Cleaned Up’ On Oct. 19, 1987, he was sitting at a row of desks on First Boston’s trading floor at Park Avenue Plaza in Manhattan when his dream came true. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 22.6 percent in the biggest one-day drop in U.S. stock market history. The crash caused Eurodollar futures to surge after the U.S. Federal Reserve pumped liquidity into the banking system, lowering interbank borrowing rates. Taleb’s positions exploded once again. “We all knew that he did well, that he cleaned up on that and made $35 million to $40 million,” Diakolios says of the sum the bank made on Taleb’s positions. “The equities guys below us thought, ‘Why did some guy upstairs make all this money on a day when everybody got killed?”‘ The payday for Taleb was big. Without divulging the amount, he says 97 percent of the money he’s ever made was on Black Monday in 1987.
Personally. He made something along the lines of 5% bonus. The $40MM was pure BS. Wildly exaggerated. It was rumored to be 5-$10MM for the bank. He couldn't make money at Paloma even if he'd tried to print some.
You know you're screwed when even Sosnoff can smell BS: http://www.allaboutalpha.com/blog/2...ar-claim-from-black-swan-fund-not-from-taleb/ In itself proof of nothing as I assume that Spitznagel trades more than SPX. How would he get around position-limits? Why not OTC? There is no client access on his site. No DD, etc. https://www.universa.net/about.html
I've met few Cowboys fans who can reliably gauge someone's expertise across finance, math, and ancient languages such as Sumerian and Aramaic in real life. And those whom I do know don't pay $5 per trade. This board is great. Long live the internet and contemporary times.