Rating: 
Summary: Top Shelf
Review: Many angles of thought on an often overlooked cornerstone of investing and life. Taleb presents a fantastic viewpoint while reminding of us of our past reading of the classics. Simply obsessed with a concept, clearly presented, the author shows a well rounded view of life from his vantage point, and a roadmap for questioning that which we infer to be reality.
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Summary: On Human Frailty
Review: This book explains in a way readily understood by the non-statistician a human frailty that bedevils us as investors: Our intuition is unsuited to dealing with the kinds of uncertainty we face in securities markets. The book shows how people are easliy fooled by phenomena that are common in markets -- sample-selection bias, events with low probability but high value (or high cost), etc. If you haven't read the book, the foregoing may make its subject seem dry and esoteric. In fact, the book is witty, and its subject matter lies at the center of decisions to own marketable securities of all kinds. Few investors in marketable securities who have read this book will ever again make investment decisions the same way; I'll make bold to say that those few will be the dullest. The melancholic reader will probably spend much less time on investment decisions after absorbing one of the books principal themes, which is that it is very often (perhaps we should say usually) impossible to distinguish investment luck from investment skill with available data. The cynical reader will be gratifed to find his apprehensions confirmed that much "track record" data has been carefully selected to present luck as skill. And the happy-go-lucky reader will be relieved to see it proven why the less often he checks his portfolio performance, the happier he will be. Most readers will reap an improved sensitivity to the distinction between signal and noise, particularly in data concerning investment returns.
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Summary: On the importance of chance in life
Review: Naseem has written a great book that explains the importance of chance in life. He uses humour to explain the various things in life that cant be attributed to anything but chance. The decisions that might look like a work of pure genius can actually have no rationale behind them. The stories that he tells while explaining the concepts are the heart and soul of this book. Its a must read.
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Summary: Taleb gives good advice
Review: Nassim's book does an excellent job of explaining (without resorting to mathematics) why randomness plays a more significant role in life than determinism. In my case, he's preaching to the choir as I've always believed in randomness. I was a little disappointed that Nassim didn't offer a way for me to avoid the black swans in life, but I liken his solution to my pet conure who prefers to be out and about rather than cooped up in his cage. Even when he's been waiting hours to come out, when I open the wide cage door, rather than dash out, he struts slowly across the door, standing tall and stretching out his neck, putting on an air of great dignity as if it was his choice when to come out. We should be equally as dignified when we are touched by the black swans of life. (What's a black swan? You have to buy the book to find out.)
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Summary: Must Own
Review: They say there are those that teach because they know nothing and those that know don't teach. This is the exception. He's been (and still is) very much a practitioner, scholar, and true renaissance man. Karl Popper would be happy.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting topic, but poor execution.
Review: Taleb claims in the introduction that he wrote the book without doing any library research. Believe the man.The overall subject of the book is interesting, and the author makes some good points here and there. However, he doesn't support his points with many references or specific examples. The book is disorganized and rambling, and Taleb often raises subjects without really explaining them thoroughly. If I didn't already know about the demise of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), then Taleb's comments on this topic would have left me scratching my head. Taleb also irritates with his constant name-dropping and providing irrelevant, personal details about the people he describes. Avoid this book, unless Taleb gets a good editor and comes out with a heavily revised edition.
Rating: 
Summary: a quick read without much content.
Review: I bought this book based on a good interview that the author gave on NPR. In that one hour interview he covered most of the main points in the book. I was dissapointed there was hardly any detail on what to do to avoid the ways of being stupid the author filled the book with. All together the author leaves a very strong impression that much of what happens in the markets is just random.
The book holds more prejudice and arrogance than useful information, if you already understand basic probablity theory. A theme in the book is that most traders don't really protect themselves from sea-changes and one time events becasue their basic methods for calculating risk are too simplistic.
The book is a quick easy read but it won't help very much in learning how to be a good trader. One man's randomness is another man's ignorance. I would suggest a book like Richard McCall's The Way of the Warrior Trader is a good antidote to the attitude and lack of practical steps of this book.
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Summary: Sidetracked by non-linearity
Review: Mr. Taleb makes some great points regarding the signal/noise problem we each confront when we try to predict future results (or evaluate past performance) based on our limited number of observations. Is Warren Buffett really, really all that great an investor? Or did we start with 100,000,000 investors and he turned out to be the luckiest? My instinct is to see patterns in performance results, to want there to be reasons for out-performance. Unfortunately Mr. Taleb doesn't talk about methods for finding the true, faint signal in a world filled with random noise, he simply points out how fraught with danger the exercise can be. The book certainly has a unique structure at every level: index, chapter, paragraph and syntax. He transgresses enough boundaries that I was left wondering at times if he had used some of Alan Sokol's tricks to build sections of "Fooled." In the end I cannot help but ponder though, if like Schrödinger's Cat, Mr. Taleb's ideas may be half-dead/half alive depending on if we open his book to look at them or not.
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Summary: A wake-up call
Review: A self-described "intellectual snob," Nassim Taleb proves it in his elaborate, sarcastic, high-handed writing style, which is still highly readable. Taleb reminds me of a mild version of one of Jack Vance's characters from the Dying Earth story cycle, with his amusingly archaic, formal style always concealing a dagger for his enemies. Half the fun is his outrageousness. The other half of the fun is not as much fun, though. Taleb's mission is to remind us that although we can find ex post facto explanations for anything, we really are not very good at predicting the future. This affects his field of financial trading even more than it does the lives of the general public. He points out that with incomplete information (and information is always incomplete), it is impossible to tell whether a given strategy is successful because it is a good one or because so many thousands of strategies are out there that it stands to reason, even if none of them are any good, that some of them by chance will have succeeded by having a "one in thousands" stroke of luck. Thus, past performance, practically worshipped as a future predictor, is not as reliable as we would like to think. This is as hard a message to internalize as it is important that we should do so. Naturally, as a trader himself who is advertising for his own fund, Taleb claims to have beaten this problem but won't tell us how. But he does not belabor this, instead impressing over and over in different ways how unsuited the human animal is to dealing with probabilities and urging us to make this part of our calculations. He gives entertaining and convincing examples of the fallacies he sees every day in business and the bases for them in human behavior. Especially in finance, healthy skepticism is very important, but rarely encouraged. Taleb's book is a valuable exception to this rule. It's an easy, fun, informative read, and more people should read it than probably will.
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Summary: Prophetic!
Review: One should look at what is going on today to be convinced that the book is prophetic. He describes the market as a scam for fools of randomness and history is proving him very very right.
Taleb scorns George Will and all the journalists who fueled the bull market.
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