Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...[T]oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...[I]f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...[S]hould he stop performing (...his odds ...have stayed at 50%) they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck.
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The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results.
[B]ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning...
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
