Former option trader and mathematical statistician who wrote Incerto, a five-volume work on uncertainty (2001–2018) that includes The Black Swan and Antifragile.
NYU Tandon
Universa Investments
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Medium (Incerto)
The Incerto is the primary source for how markets and institutions handle tail risk, and the accompanying technical work supplies the mathematics others cite.
7 books of their own · 40 articles · 37 books they recommend
Technical manual on managing vanilla and exotic options
Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.
“Fooled by Randomness is a serious, intellectually sophisticated book, well worth reading carefully. At times, the book is condescending. Nevertheless, there are some great insights.” — Barton Biggs
Source: Biggs on a sophisticated book worth reading carefully
Recommended by: Barton Biggs, Michael Mauboussin and 11 others
Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.
“The message of The Black Swan is how important it is to realize that the things everyone rules out can still come to pass.” — Howard Marks
Source: Oaktree memo 'The Limits to Negativism'
Recommended by: Howard Marks, Marc Andreessen, Nat Eliason and 18 others
Aphorisms stating Taleb's ideas on randomness, knowledge and modern life.
Recommended by: Nat Eliason, Ryan Holiday, Matt Mullenweg and 2 others
Incerto volume 4
“Nassim Taleb, author of the new book Antifragile, praises volatility and criticises those who would artificially damp it at great unseen cost. Taleb advises us to be 'anti-fragile'. This is exactly…” — Seth Klarman
Source: Klarman on Taleb's praise of volatility and what Baupost strives for
Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Nat Eliason and 25 others
Incerto volume 5
Recommended by: Nat Eliason, Ana Fabrega, Ben Horowitz and 12 others
Technical companion to the Incerto; free preprint on arXiv
Dynamic Hedging | Technical manual on managing vanilla and exotic options | 1997 | T4 | – |
Fooled by Randomness | Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets. | 2001 | T4 | Barton Biggs, Michael Mauboussin, Mohnish Pabrai and 10 others |
The Black Swan | Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact. | 2007 | T4 | Howard Marks, Marc Andreessen, Nat Eliason and 18 others |
The Bed of Procrustes | Aphorisms stating Taleb's ideas on randomness, knowledge and modern life. | 2010 | Nat Eliason, Ryan Holiday, Matt Mullenweg and 2 others | |
Antifragile | Incerto volume 4 | 2012 | T3 | Mohnish Pabrai, Nat Eliason, Patrick Collison and 24 others |
Skin in the Game | Incerto volume 5 | 2018 | T3 | Nat Eliason, Ana Fabrega, Ben Horowitz and 12 others |
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails | Technical companion to the Incerto; free preprint on arXiv | 2020 | T3 | – |
What each econometric technique is for, what it assumes and what goes wrong.
Power laws, scaling and critical points across physical and social systems
Analytic philosophy and logic presented through humour
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, social sciences
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai
Also recommended by: Patrick Collison, Bret Victor
The technical reference on extreme value theory for insurance and finance
The graduate engineering text on probability and stochastic processes.
Freedman on regression's assumptions and the causal claims it cannot support
How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics
Compact mathematical treatment of derivative pricing and its applications
A quant on confusing models with reality, in finance and life
Philosophical treatment of contingency and the practice of option trading
Why standard finance models understate market risk, from fractal geometry's creator.
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Log-periodic power laws as a physicist's model of crash formation
Incerto volume 4
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Nat Eliason and 24 others
Nozick on objectivity and what stays invariant across perspectives
Eco on how we categorise the world and where categories fail
Aphorisms stating Taleb's ideas on randomness, knowledge and modern life.
Also recommended by: Nat Eliason, Ryan Holiday, Matt Mullenweg and 1 other
Essays on self-knowledge and how unreliable one's own judgement is.
History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, social sciences
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai
How testosterone feeds traders' winning streaks and appetite for risk.
Beyond a point, more options make people less likely to choose and less satisfied.
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, business and money
Also recommended by: Nat Eliason, Nick Sleep
Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.
Also recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson, Charles de Vaulx and 31 others
Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, literature
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Binmore on when Bayesian decision theory applies and when it does not
Elster on mechanisms rather than laws in the social sciences
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, social sciences
Also recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai
Network science on how success and reputation compound unequally
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, business and money
Also recommended by: Vinod Khosla
Builds out Munger's latticework idea from primary sources.
Also recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson, Nat Eliason and 7 others
Cities as labour markets, and planning that works with land markets.
Source: Taleb's collected book recommendations, social sciences
Also recommended by: Alexis Ohanian, Emmett Shear
Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.
Also recommended by: Balaji S. Srinivasan, Eric Weinstein and 35 others
Why the advice that fat is bad and carbohydrates better may be wrong about health.
Also recommended by: Naval Ravikant, Peter Attia, Zooko Wilcox
Edited volume of collected papers.
Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.
Also recommended by: Howard Marks, Marc Andreessen, Nat Eliason and 17 others
US subtitle differs
| Nassim Taleb: my rules for life | The Guardian | 2012 |
| Blowing Up Paywall | The New Yorker | 2002 |