I’m in receipt today of a collection of emails from Janet Tavakoli. You may recall some controversy around figures NNT was quoted to have said in a GQ article. I believe I’ve posted about this elsewhere on the blog. It’s from 2009. As you know, I have no relationship with Nassim Taleb, I’m simply collecting, in one place, information related to him and his ideas, for people who, like myself, find his thinking fascinating. I am a fan, certainly not a devotee. So in the interest of fairness, and perhaps also, to provide a place for Ms. Tavakoli to further make her case, I’m posting these links to various articles and documents she presents.
Taleb’s Stranded Swan? pdf TSF Commentary – June 3, 2009 By Janet Tavakoli
Taleb Kills $20 Billion Mythical Swan pdf
And via Janet Tavakoli: Where Were Drama Pundits — Whitney, Taleb and Gasparino — When It Mattered? | The Big Picture.
Taleb asserted the article was about philosophy, and one should ignore the numbers. The Times (among others) didn’t seem to see it that way. The Times’s original reference to GQ’s article focused on the erroneous $20 billion in trading gains months before Taleb made his correction in the face of media pressure. As for Taleb’s eventual explanation that the “$20 billion” referred to a “notional” amount of derivatives that produced between $250 to $500 million in gains, it raises further strategy questions.
