The Tasgall Group

You’ve at least heard of the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb if not read it. The main point of the book is that many people trade in the markets based only on the experiences that are probably, ignoring the possibility of the existence of a black swan.

The definition from Investopedia of a black swan is “An event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that would be extremely difficult to predict.” Most people would consider the crash of ’87 to be a “black swan event”.

Ok, so here comes a new tack for Tasgall posts… I’m making this post in the form of a question. Have you ever seen or experienced a black swan? Either something you thought would never happen, or something that you didn’t even think could happen? If you haven’t seen one, what potential black swans keep you up at night?

To try to use the full leverage of WordPress, we’ll see if we can use Trackbacks to have responses show up as a new post as well as a comment under this post. If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll just play around with it to see if this is useful.

To use trackback, just enter the URL of this article in the following section of the “write post” page when you’re in WordPress… I also added a new category called “discussion” if we like the discussion format and want to continue it for other topics…

Update – You need to use the “trackback url” to get it to work properly.? The one for this article is http://www.tasgall.com/2006/08/22/black-swans/trackback/ and you can see the link to it in the upper right hand corner of the page:

Right click to copy the link location and then paste it in the trackbacks on your new post.