Published: January 6, 2009
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has over 20 years’ experience as a quant analyst and options trader at UBS, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas and elsewhere. He is now advisor to Universa Investments, a hedge fund that is up 115% in the last two years.
He is also a world-famous philosopher, and author of the best-selling book, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which among other achievements predicted the collapse of Fannie Mae. A Black Swan event is an event deemed highly improbable (like the probability of a swan being black), which can still occur and have an enormous impact on a system or market. This is a talk he gave at the Hedge Funds World Conference in Zurich in December.