Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Betting on the success of innovative technologies in the marketplace can carry all the uncertainty and risk that betting on the next card in the deck does at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. There is a factor of randomness that must be factored in, but precisely how to do so is anyone's guess.

Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

There is no safe haven in today's markets.

This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

Betting that markets will be 'volatile' is like betting the weather will be partly cloudy. It's a smart-sounding strategy that doesn't mean much.

Uncertainty is bad for business.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

Everything's a risk, by the way, these days. Every film you make is a risk. There's no guarantee.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

Obviously, no one knows when the market is going to bottom out, and I am certainly not an economist.

Investors don't like uncertainty.

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

The difference between playing the stock market and the horses is that one of the horses must win.

I used to go to Vegas and play the horses, and then I realised how ridiculous that was. There is no winning in gambling, but there is on the stock market.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

There is no elimination of all risks.

Anyone who says he is an expert in the market is lying to you. There is no such thing.

There's so much disagreement about investing, and it's because nobody really knows.