The Incerto has more than 200 translations in 41 languages.Having a title with the word 'Fooled' in it, Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets practically begs to be reviewed here. Taleb has also published close to 55 academic and scholarly papers as a backup, technical footnotes to the Incerto in topics ranging from Statistical Physics and Quantitative Finance to Genetics and International affairs. He is the author of the Incerto (latin for uncertainty), accessible in any order (Skin in the Game, Antifragile, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, and Fooled by Randomness) plus a technical version, The Technical Incerto (Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails). In addition to his life as a trader he spent several years as an academic researcher (12 years as Distinguished Professor at New York University’s School of Engineering, Dean’s Professor at U. He now spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés.

His focus in on how different systems handle disorder. Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent more than two decades as a risk taker before becoming a full-time essayist and scholar focusing on practical, philosophical, and mathematical problems with chance, luck, and probability. Taleb refuses all awards and honours as they debase His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-three languages. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute.

He has spent his life immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge, and he has led three high-profile careers around his ideas, as a man of letters, as a businessman-trader, and as a university professor and researcher. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a radical and paradoxical philosopher for our times. This irreverent bestseller has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them how to recognize randomness. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the markets – we hear an entrepreneur has ‘vision’ or a trader is ‘talented’, but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is all about luck: more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy – or something altogether more unpredictable? This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world.

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Fool of randomness