Fooled By Randomness Book Report
Nassim Taleb's book ‘Fooled by Randomness’, explores many themes and concepts of randomness and probability in the business world. The main point that Taleb argues is that chance plays a dominant role in many aspects of our daily life, including financial markets, and that to succeed in life the role of chance must be understood, so that a person can maximise their gains and minimise their losses. In his book Taleb aimed to encourage his readers to clearly see the illusions of skill in their lives and recognise that the patterns that behaviours are commonly based on are merely random outcomes interpreted with biases. In several incidences, Taleb uses examples from the gambling literature to explain the role of chance, probability and perceptual biases, most frequently in …show more content…
The book overall is filled with lots of information that will make you sit up and examine the effects of luck and randomness in your everyday life. However, it is important to emphasise that Taleb never make the case that skills or other personal attributes don’t count towards success, he just stresses that they count much less than we give people credit for. This paper through the discussion of the main themes and concepts aims to produce a thorough and conclusive standpoint.
One of the main themes of the book is randomness. Taleb states that the flows and the twists of a financial market and of life itself, are all largely random. Which in turn, implies that success and failure are determined mainly by random events. This theory puts Taleb in a position where he is supposedly saying that education, training and skill count for nothing and that randomness decides whether a person is successful or not. So, a trader who is more successful could be said by Taleb to simply be more lucky, rather than more skilful or
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