Comments on: Quants and the Black Swan http://randomfoolishness.com/2007/01/23/quants-and-the-black-swan/ random thoughts on random topics for a random world Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:43:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.5 by: coxy http://randomfoolishness.com/2007/01/23/quants-and-the-black-swan/#comment-7 Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:52:37 +0000 http://randomfoolishness.com/2007/01/23/quants-and-the-black-swan/#comment-7 Although I loved Moneyball, I can't quite say I got anything from Fooled by Randomness. First of all I was really turned off by his cockiness. He is extremely pretentious in not only his writing, but in how he describes his trading style. Second of all, I did not learn anything new. Yes, I understand that the stock market is random and traders and active money managers typically falsely believe their ability to beat the market. When they do beat the market, its skill, when they dont its the markets fault. I think that is pretty well known - sorry to you out there who invest in mutual funds and are unaware of this. I work for a start up 130-30 quant hedge fund, and as so, I was hoping there would be an argument pro or against quant investing in discovering an underlying order to the madness of the markets. I don't recall him addressing the issue too overtly, or taking one side or the other. Yes he alluded to LTCM's bust, but didn't really expound on his opinion of quant investing as a whole. All in all, the author bragged about his ability to stay conservative and not get caught up in the randomness of the stock market. But his pretentious writing style and lack of info made the book boring and uninformative. Don't know how people saw this book as revolutionary. Although I loved Moneyball, I can’t quite say I got anything from Fooled by Randomness. First of all I was really turned off by his cockiness. He is extremely pretentious in not only his writing, but in how he describes his trading style. Second of all, I did not learn anything new. Yes, I understand that the stock market is random and traders and active money managers typically falsely believe their ability to beat the market. When they do beat the market, its skill, when they dont its the markets fault. I think that is pretty well known - sorry to you out there who invest in mutual funds and are unaware of this.

I work for a start up 130-30 quant hedge fund, and as so, I was hoping there would be an argument pro or against quant investing in discovering an underlying order to the madness of the markets. I don’t recall him addressing the issue too overtly, or taking one side or the other. Yes he alluded to LTCM’s bust, but didn’t really expound on his opinion of quant investing as a whole.

All in all, the author bragged about his ability to stay conservative and not get caught up in the randomness of the stock market. But his pretentious writing style and lack of info made the book boring and uninformative. Don’t know how people saw this book as revolutionary.

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