Nassim Taleb

[riskadverse]

Here is a video of his interview on CNBC this morning. (There is an ad for the first 30 seconds or so).
Video - CNBC.com

I just finished his first book "Fooled by Randomness". While I won't review it, I felt it was well worth the read.

[ls99]

Link would not play in firefox. Had to go to CNBC to play clip. Good discussion.

Question: in the clip Taleb advocates investing in cash.

How does one invest in cash?

[haha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ls99 Question: in the clip Taleb advocates investing in cash. How does one invest in cash?

Go to your local bank, S&L or Credit Union. Take out a CD. You will then have invested in cash.

Ha

[ESRBob]

Typically holding funds in a money market account has been considered 'cash'. They're also guaranteed by the feds now (I think it is the MM fund manager's choice to pay extra for that guarantee, but the big ones are in this program)

[haha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ESRBob Typically holding funds in a money market account has been considered 'cash'. They're also guaranteed by the feds now (I think it is the MM fund manager's choice to pay extra for that guarantee, but the big ones are in this program)

Taleb's concern is not with immediate availability, it is with absence of credit or interest rate risk, or market value fluctuations. In his books( both of which I have read) he extols T-bills.

Ha

[Nords]

I tried to read "Black Swan", I really did.

Spouse had it for a couple weeks and finally said "I give up, I'm tired of the math." (She's taken more math courses than I have.) She appreciates his turkey analogy, and "Gobble, gobble" has entered our household verbal shorthand.

By the time I got my hands on it the library wouldn't renew it, so I waited a couple more months for another copy. By then the suspense was killing me.

When I finally cracked it open, ready to be amazed, I could barely get through the introduction. The guy is so snarky, so grumpy, so curmudgeonly, and so needlessly hostile about everything that it's impossible to get past the tone to his thesis. If Bernstein had written the book from Taleb's notes, it'd be a NYT best-seller. As it is, I feel like locking Taleb in a room with Friedman & Al Gore and letting them solve the world's problems without me. Assuming they survive having to deal with each other...

If Taleb's grumpy now, wait until he realizes that he's been advocating Treasuries during one of the biggest Treasury bubbles of the last 50 years. I hope those options pay off for him.