Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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The Normal Distribution and Its Limits

Mental models

The bell curve is the right model where outcomes are additive and independent, and the wrong one wherever they multiply or feed back. Finance is full of the second kind, so variance and correlation understate what can actually happen. Using the Gaussian outside its domain is the single most expensive modelling error in markets.

Books 7Experts 2Recommenders 24Resources 3

Start here

  1. Naked StatisticsCharles Wheelan, 2013
  2. The Black SwanNassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007
  3. The Misbehavior of MarketsBenoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson, 2004
The Misbehavior of MarketsThe Misbehavior of Markets
T1 The Misbehavior of Markets
Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson · 2004
Open LibraryGoodreads

Why standard finance models understate market risk, from fractal geometry's creator.

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and 1 other

The Black SwanThe Black Swan
T1 The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007
Open LibraryGoodreads

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

Probability, Random Variables and StochasticProbability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes
T2 Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes
Athanasios Papoulis, S. Unnikrishna Pillai · 1965
Open LibraryGoodreads

The graduate engineering text on probability and stochastic processes.

Recommended by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Models.Behaving.Badly.Models.Behaving.Badly.
T2 Models.Behaving.Badly.
Emanuel Derman · 2011
Open LibraryGoodreads

A quant on confusing models with reality, in finance and life

Recommended by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Naked StatisticsNaked Statistics
T2 Naked Statistics
Charles Wheelan · 2013
Open LibraryGoodreads

Statistics without the maths, for reading claims: averages, correlation, regression.

Recommended by: Keith Rabois

Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes HappenUbiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen
T3 Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen
Mark Buchanan · 2000
Open LibraryGoodreads
Statistical Consequences of Fat TailsStatistical Consequences of Fat Tails
T3 Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2020
Open LibraryGoodreads

Technical companion to the Incerto; free preprint on arXiv

More mental models

← The Map Is Not the TerritoryThe Principal-Agent Problem →All mental models