Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1)

(surprisingly, MBAs, in spite of the insults, represent a significant portion of my readership, simply because they think that my ideas apply to other MBAs and not to them).

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict.

Living like this, one can also go to bed early and not optimize one’s schedule by squeezing every minute out of one’s evening. At the limit, you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.

A more human version can be read in Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, a soothing and surprisingly readable book that I distribute to my trader friends (Seneca also took his own life when cornered by destiny).

That is what stoicism truly means. It is the attempt by man to get even with probability. I need not be nasty at all and break the spell of the poem and its message, but I cannot resist some cynicism. A couple of decades later, Cavafy, while dying of throat cancer, did not quite follow the prescription. Deprived of his voice by the surgeons, he use

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

(note that even institutional investors seem to have a neocortex).

I have always believed that professional option traders and market makers by dint of practicing their probabilistic game build an innate probabilistic machine that is far more developed than the rest of the population—even that of probabilists. I found a confirmation of that as researchers in the heuristics and biases tradition believe that System

This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But we saw John reaching $1 million having had a total of $10 million; he was happier when he only had half a million (starting at nothing) than where we left him in Chapter 1.