Black Swan

I am becoming obsessed with randomness and probability. What follows is based very heavily on Nassim Nicholas Taleb research. Imagine a turkey on a farm. Everyday the turkey has ever known, the farmer comes every morning and feeds it. From the turkey's point of view, the farmer is a friend, a trusted being. Then, one morning, the farmer kills the turkey. A black swan has occurred from the point of view of the turkey. A completely unexpected event.

Take our stock market, heck take the entire global market, companies, and global economies have created multiple levels to guard against risk. Options trading, derivatives, options on derivatives, credit default swaps, and so on, and on, and on. Each product is designed to allow some risk, some profit, and some safety. Some products have two components such as derivatives, allowing a company to sell its risk to others. Risk, actually, is an interesting side of the coin. Companies have large staffs of risk professionals, calculating, and guarding the said corporations from risk. Recently, companies started to realize that risk comes in many forms, and a new area was born "operational risk". This is the risk where an employee goes crazy and shoots everyone. So, you would argue that all this guards the said companies from risk. Now, Nassim Taleb, and myself, actually believe that this enhances risk. All this calculating is simply creating an impression of safety. Like the turkey, we go day in and day out believing we are safe, until one day, the farmer kills the turkey.

The basic problem is that we can't understand the future. In fact, we can't understand that we can't understand the future. We keep believing in things, looking for correlations, patterns in randomness. We find them, in fact we tend to create patterns in randomness. Are the markets random? I would argue no. In fact, I would argue that the markets are becoming very much un-random. The markets are starting to be governed by machines following very concrete rules. There are also very few players in the market that have the weight to move markets, and a lot of those players are using machines. All of this is very scary.

Another interesting example is China. An unprecedented amount of common people are investing heavily in the market. And, the market is going up and up and up. But, like everything else in life, it will come down, and boy will it come down hard. And there will be ripples throw the global markets, and global economies. But, this isn't the black swan I am afraid of. I am afraid of something more. I am afraid of something we don't know is going to happen.