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Comment by kevstev | Hacker News Reader

For more investor funds. Also, his style of investing is supposed to make a killing during times like this- but when you are flat to down a few percent for all the boring years in between black swan events, things don't look great.

There is also ego and prestige, and Taleb seems to desire both to a great degree.

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The problem is not Taleb's trading method, it would provide a great return if the US had free markets...what the fed is currently doing is more akin to communism, bailing out and buying up all the essential industries.

While I agree that the Fed may be overplaying their hand, I disagree that Taleb has an otherwise outperforming strategy. The cost of hedging against black swan events is not zero, and has increased substantially since the financial crisis- at least in part by his own work to increase awareness of them! Volatility used to be greatly underpriced by the market, and while that may still be true, its not nearly true to the extent it was pre-crisis.

We are not out of the crisis yet. Taleb has been banging this drum for decades, and profited handsomely in 2008, and IIRC also in 2001 and 1998. His lesson was not appreciated by the industry at large during those decades - and it is likely that a couple of years after the end of this crisis (whenever that may be, anywhere from a few month to over a decade), hedging black swans will be cheap again.

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