Question: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path?

Answer:

• Anything by Peter Senge.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
• Once you are Lucky, Twice you are good – Sara Lacey
• Revolutionary Wealth – Alvin Toffler
• Black Swan – Taleb
• Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen Pao.
• Creative Class – Richard Florida
• Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace
• Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
• American Government 101: From the Continental Congress to the Iowa Caucus, Everything You Need to Know About US Politics – Kathleen Spears
• The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
• Any book by Herman Hesse
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

I am relieved to finally find a book that deals with Black Swan Events in a new way. Ayache brings a reverse-probabilistic perspective: instead of considering that a price is the result of probabilistically derived expectation, he reverses the issues and investigates these artificial constructs as "probabilities" and "expectations" as secondary, derived, fictitious concepts that we bring about to explain prices, decisions, and other things.

This, of course, is just the beginning, so one has to be understanding about the speculative aspect of the effort --so view this as a gutsy look at the "end of probability" and how we will need to envision the world once we get rid of this artificial, antiquated tool. I am also glad to see that those of us trained in the trading of options can have views original enough to influence the philosophy of probability and the philosophical understanding of contingency.

I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen's inequality in domains and found it exposed here (in other words, why a combination low dose (most of the time) and high dose (rarely) beats medium dose all the time. The authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1) acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence of stressors and chronic ones (this includes thermal variations); 2) stressors make one stronger (post traumatic growth); 3) risk management is mediated by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4) winning causes an increase in strength (the latter are more complicated effects of convexity/Jensen's Inequality).

Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar.

Bravo!

As a speculator I learned to take the best from books and ideas without arguments (many readers seem to be training to be shallow critics)--good insights are hard to come by. One does not find these in the writings of a journalist. There are some things personal to the author that might be uninteresting to some, but I take the package. The man is one of the greatest traders in history. There are a few jewels in there.

The man did it. I'd rather listen to him than read better written but hollow prose from some journalist-writer.

​This summer, Mackenna is learning more about the birth of behavioral economics, the psychology of white collar crime, and the restoration of American cities as locations of economic growth.