An Allocator’s Manifesto: Why is every single fund top quartile?

In statistical distributions with thick tails, as Nassim Taleb says, the tail wags the dog . The relevant information is all in the tails, not in the body. Why would an allocator want statistical estimators to ignore the tail and instead overweight the center of the distribution, which is predominantly noise?

Statistical robustness is about finding metrics that can handle tail events, large deviations, without changing much. And, for measuring venture returns, the median is used vs. the mean because it is more robust as a statistical estimator. It represents the typical outcome (i.e., middle-of-the-road funds) vs. the mean that is sensitive to outliers ... See more