Uncovering the Influences of Chance on Life and Financial Markets: A Review of Fooled by Randomness

Y Maheshwary: For anyone who wants to excel in life, this is a book to read. It will inform us of our shortcomings in a very readable manner.

India on Sep 30, 2023

Harshdeep Mehta: Book-Level: Advanced

The book brings "randomness" to the centre of the thought process. The idea that history is just one sample path randomly chosen from all the available sample paths at that point was explained well.

Author, as expected, and seen on YouTube videos, does have a different attitude and tone on his writing, but I feel it suits him.

Solon's explanation on who is luckiest was a good one too. There are several other characters and points which are explained well but probably I either couldn't recollect as I am writing this review OR I simply glanced them through.

Nevertheless, this did make me fan of NNT, and worth a re-read.

India on Sep 14, 2023

Georg H.: Potentially life-changing book as it highlights the role of randomness in everyday life.

Basically, the book is about the importance of randomness in our everyday lives and how we don't perceive it. The book shows through numerous examples and little stories how randomness shapes events, which we usually don't attribute to chance. The book manages to change your intuition about a lot of topics with regard to success and failure and makes you a bit more humble in the moments of success and less full of despair in times of distress.

The book might be a bit too long to get the point across but all in all it is very worthwhile and entertaining read, especially if you enjoy Taleb's humour. If you have enjoyed Taleb's other work, this is a must read.

Germany on Aug 17, 2023

: This book should be required reading in high school. It will help you see so many problems in how we evaluate data and success. I couldn't recommend it more.

Italy on Jul 22, 2023

Gabriel Hernandez: It's not intuitive that life is laced with as much luck as Taleb claims, especially not while we're surrounded by so many experts providing an endless flow of narratives. Then again, if you took this book, held it up to his current expert musings on Twitter, you'd find yourself looking the other way at his behavior.

His journey through the work of Kahneman and Tversky was great. We are hardwired to be biased in so many ways when it comes to data and its interpretation. We're not made for a world with so much randomness. People do suck at probability. You have to go out of your way to activate system 2 to truly understand something. My favorite bias, if that's something you can have a favorite of, was the survivorship bias. It had never occurred to me how much of the story we're missing simply by acknowledging the small sample of winners and survivors at the expense of the set that isn't in the winner's circle.

I like to use the term mind blowing when I read a book I really enjoy, but this book is more mind melting, in that you end up questioning your own frameworks and paradigms. As a parent, after reading this book it's easy to view your kids' shenanigans as 'noise'...

United States on Jun 21, 2023

Phil: Fooled by Randomness Review

This is my third Taleb book and I actually believe it's his best work. Black Swan is close behind and was my first read of his. Earlier in the year picked up Skin in The Game, which I don’t recommend unless you’ve read his other books because you will think him a bit too much.

Fooled by Randomness is Taleb before he became a little bit too cocky with himself. You can see that he still possesses his large ego and humour in this one but hasn't gone overboard with his own success like we find him in his latest book, Skin in the game.

Don’t ask me why I started with Black Swan rather than this, I was told by many that Black Swan was better than this but I disagree now. I am thankful to have listened to a podcast recently from Howard Marks discussing how this is one of his favourites and I can see why.

Onto the book itself - FBR is as I said in the headline to be considered a 'classic'. Why? It gets you to think about how random the world can truly be and how the events we reflect on now was just one of many paths that occurred. It is one of those books that I think everyone should revisit every year or two when they have...

Australia on Oct 26, 2018

Greg Linster: Using his trademark aphoristic bent, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Arrogance in persons of merit affronts us more than arrogance in those without merit: merit itself is an affront". I've come to realize that some people find Nassim Taleb's arrogance quite repugnant, but, personally, I find it rather charming. I suspect that the same people who find Taleb's arrogance off-putting are the people who wish they possessed a shred of his erudition. Nietzsche was certainly on to something; it's hard to avoid being offended by your betters.

I think I first read "Fooled By Randomness" circa 2006. Recently, I felt a longing to reread Taleb's first non-technical book again. Wow, what a wise decision that was! I actually digested more from the rereading than I did from the initial reading (and I digested quite a bit from the first reading). Both times, I focused on reading the book very, very slowly. Obviously, the fact that I spent the time to reread this book is indicative of how valuable I think it is.

Known for his great wit, the baseball pitcher Vernon Louis "Lefty" Gomez was fond of saying that, "I'd rather be lucky than good." This phrase, in essence, is one of the central...

United States on Aug 08, 2013

Rhushikesh Bhadkamkar: This is one the first books I ever read on markets and trading. However compared to its reviews it turned out to something completely different. It definitely was not a kind of a book where you can just read and move on but a kind that actually makes you stop and think. I always had the impression that books about the market or the economy come with a baggage of understanding the material and concepts beforehand. Fooled by Randomness threw me back by the way Nassim the author, portrayed the various facets in which randomness and probability not only rule markets or trading but everyone's life in general. It was fascinating to see that such a world even exists and that people who are driven by profit do not always take a straightforward path.
Overall the book was interesting for a novice reader but definitely not an easy to follow book. There were many parts of the book where I had to stop and read twice or thrice to understand what the author is trying to say. It definitely shows you a different mindset of the Type A personality investment bankers and traders.
The book walks through various phases of how randomness and probability affect people from all walks of life. It is...

United States on Nov 21, 2012