Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life

In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb takes the reader on a fascinating journey through our perceptions of success, failure and luck. He takes the mathematics and psychology of probability and explains them with reference to the financial markets and life in general. Concepts such as survivorship bias, induction and our genetic lack of fitness for the modern world are laid before the reader in a highly entertaining and accessible narrative that sweeps across the trading rooms of New York and Chicago, passing along the way Solon (the Ancient World's wisest man), the philosophy of Karl Popper and the pronouncements of Yogi Berra ("it ain't over 'till the fat lady sings") amongst others. At the end of the journey, the reader is left with a deep understanding of the role randomness plays in all our lives.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the founder of Empirica Capital LLC, a crisis-hunting hedge fund operator, and a fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has held a variety of derivative trading positions in New York and London and worked as an independent floor trader in Chicago. Taleb was inducted in February 2001 in the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame.

Taleb received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris Dauphine. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (Wiley, 1997).