The Black Swan: The High Impact of the Highly Improbable was published in 2007, so it is a pre-crisis book. However, the writer Nicholas Taleb is still able to captivate the reader nowadays and this makes it a timeless book. Taleb has become a distinct criticaster of the financial world where he started himself as a trader. At the start of his career he was active in both equity and bond derivatives and later he became a market maker. He included in his bestseller The Black Swan both his positive and his negative experiences and sometimes he takes in the book a philosophical direction.

The book is about unpredictable events that have a huge impact. Before the crisis in 2008, the rise of  the “quantitative investor” in the financial world was big and it seemed like you could make a model for everything. When you have data you can make a quantitative model and you can start as an investor. However, there are unpredictable elements that cannot be included in a model.

During quantitative investing you can of course explain drawdowns afterwards and that is the insight Taleb wants to give you with his book. He gives an insight how these Black Swans can have a positive effect as well.

OpinioPro vs The Black Swan

This book makes you think about the fact how much time you spend on predictions, certainly with investing. A good philosophy or strategy is to bear in mind you can come across unexpected issues. This is a good addition to the investing policy. Knowing what experts are thinking belongs to the financial world and having a different vision is not automatically a negative thing. It might be a realistic vision we do not want to see. OpinioPro is a platform for professional investors to find many visions on a topic that is at issue in their organization in a fast way. Visions of both supporters and of opponents!

On OpinioPro’s platform, you can find new research on a daily basis. However, you can also search an asset manager’s vision he had in the past. At the moment Brexit, asset allocation and factor investments are hot topics on www.opiniopro.com.

OpinioPro has currently over 2,500 investment research reports on these subjects at its platform. The best ‘research engine’ is now available without registration on www.opiniopro.com.

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