The cover story of the May edition of the Bloomberg Markets magazine discusses Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s affect on Wall Street:
On a freezing day in March 2007, Nassim Taleb walked into a conference room at Morgan Stanley’s Manhattan offices on 47th Street and Broadway to address a group of the firm’s risk managers. His message: Your models don’t work.
Using a whiteboard to scribble out his calculations, Taleb, now 48, began one of his rants, this time against stress tests–Wall Street lingo for examining how a market rout will play out. Stress tests are inherently risky because they ignore rare but potentially devastating events, Taleb said.
It’s always interesting to see what other investors or thinkers have on their bookshelf. In the introduction to the article, there’s a picture of Nassim Taleb in his library. Using the hard copy, I picked out a few books that Taleb has read (or hasn’t read, by Umberto Eco standards). These should be useful for expanding one’s network of mental models:
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett
- Collapse, by Jared Diamond
- Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond
- The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
- Rational Herds, by Christophe Chamley
- The Perception of Risk, by Paul Slovic
- Knowledge and Decisions, by Thomas Sowell
- Serendipity, by Royston Roberts
- The Construction of Preference, by Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic
- Evolutionary Dynamics, by Martin Nowak
- The Quark and the Jaguar, by Murray Gell-Mann
- Why Beauty is Truth, by Ian Stewart
- The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, by John Hobson
- For and Against Method, by Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend
- Probability via Expectation, by Peter Whittle
- Probability Theory, by E. T. Jaynes
- Plight of the Fortune Tellers, by Riccardo Rebonato
- Imperfect Knowledge Economics, by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg
- The Business of Options, by Martin O’Connell
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery, by Karl Popper
- Unmaking the West, by Philip Tetlock
On another note, I have joined the team of authors at Reflections on Value Investing. If you haven’t already, head over and subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s a must for any value investor. Although this was posted at both sites, for the most part, my occasional posts at Reflections will have different content than FutureBlind.