Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a veteran trader, argues that people routinely mistake luck for skill and explain random outcomes as if they had clear causes. Using trading and the markets as his main setting, he examines survivorship bias, the habit of studying winners while forgetting the far larger crowd of losers, and skewed bets that win small almost every time and then lose everything at once. The cast ranges from Solon and Odysseus to Karl Popper, George Soros and Yogi Berra, alongside a fictional character named Nero. Published in 2001, it is the first part of the Incerto, Taleb's multi-volume essay on uncertainty that continues with The Black Swan and Antifragile.

James Clear put it on his list of the 10 books with the most page-for-page wisdom. Oaktree co-chairman Howard Marks called it a really important book for its ideas on how much randomness exists in the world.