elemennop posted:

Stories about how his mentor, and only other great man, Mandelbrot was exiled by the french academy since they couldn't see his vision.

the cool thing about this is that his uncle was part of the cabal that drummed him out of the french academy. anyway mirowski has a much better thing about mandelbrot and economics than taleb.

getfiscal posted:

like on SA they have had a lot of investing threads in the past

sounds like some good shit

Keven posted:

Revolution is coming so invest all your money into dope t shirts to wear when the revolution comes so 3rd worlders see how good your graphic t game is when they get here.

i just got a tshirt contract for 100-300$
also i stopped reading books and started writing em/spoken word/bardic epic poetry

getfiscal posted:

i started reading black swan and it's a funny book because the author is an eccentric who insists on coining a lot of terms and almost all the terms are of abuse. my cranky professor the other day was talking about how a lot of social science academics hate reduction to absurdity arguments. i guess in economics almost everything tends to be trying to prove counterintuitive ideas about why otherwise self-evident policies won't work. but if you take a perspective and show an economist that it leads to insanity they don't really care.

wow this guy. not only is black swan obvious, his next book, "antifragile", is 519 pages and it has one idea that he repeats about 200 times, in between going on and on about how amazingly intelligent he is and how stupid everyone else is. i couldn't fucking stand it

spoiler so no one ever has to read the book: i, the great nassim, have discovered entirely independently that some complex things get better when they are put through stress, for example the evolutionary process creates stronger organisms through selection. when stresses are taken away from these things, they fail to become better, which is why our current society has produced a bunch of pussy girly men who cry and are all less smart than me, the great nassim. now let me, the great nassim, explain this for 518 3/4 more pages.

getfiscal posted:

my takeaway from efficient market stuff was always like... to beat the market you need information that other people don't have, and if you're some random investor who only cares about their personal life goals or whatever then like you should probably just measure risk and reward in a straightforward way rather than doing any weird schemes. i guess the hypothesis itself goes much deeper into like saying all known information is embedded into assets, which is wrong, but in terms of the book random walk by malkiel it's basically true for most people.

stegosaurus posted:

wher the FUCK is the rhizzone edited volume on investing strategy

more accurately the weighted average of known information is embedded into assets (priced in, as they say), i.e., market actors' opinion is multiplied by the money they can deploy towards that asset.

market actors are of course an incredibly small group; individual investors making individual decisions to buy/sell stocks make up such a small section of the market so as to be completely irrelevant to price movement. most decisions are made by asset/fund managers who follow analyst research which is more or less the equivalent of an excel spreadsheet where quarterly reports go in, some assumptions are made, and probable outcomes according to generally accepted ideas come out. there is a little variation here and there but not really.

for example: https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ao?s=TSLA+Analyst+Opinion -- the consensus is basically that TSLA (Tesla) will reach 300 in a year, from 227 now (+32%). so it probably will, since the people who have the consensus also set the prices (effectively, due to the above). which is convenient!

(and yes as you will see in that link, opinions differ a little occasionally, sometimes an analyst wants to make a splashy opinion or a bank wants to make a big statement. but we are just talking averages here and it's the aggregate opinion that matters, not outliers.)

if you want to do better than the people who set the prices, then you have to have your own opinion of how a stock will do and be confident that it's better than the weighted-by-buying-power consensus. in my opinion this isn't very hard because you have the freedom of not being chained to that consensus, so you can just evaluate what a company actually does, and what you think that company's market will be like, in some given time period, and then think "well they'll probably do pretty fucking well", e.g., and then buy it and once they do actually do well, and results are announced, the models will get updated and the price will get updated and then you can sell. it's all just an incomplete information game. (i think this is obvious???)

if you just want to do as well as the people who set the prices, it's pretty easy. but of course you aren't starting with as much money as they have, so you will never catch up. the best you can ever do is to maintain your current gap between you and the ruling class. rip!!1 good luck and have fun!!!! p.s. i have literally zero assets and i don't know anything.