Rating: 
Summary: Intuitive arguments against causality
Review: The author explains in convincing arguments that we overstate causality; he provides clear examples to prove his point. It does not mean that everything is random, only that we err by underestimating chance. He convincingly shows that 1) chance is much more prevalent that we tend to think, 2) that we are genetically led to underestimate its role, 3) That even scientists tend to be fooled by randomness because of their use of Normal-Gauss curves.
This book will ruffling a lot of feathers, particularly among economics academics and City hotshots. History seems to be proving him right.
Rating: 
Summary: Sour grapes and monkeys
Review: A serious bit of fermented sour grapes by someone who is jealous of anyone who made money during the 1990's.The whole book is based on the idea that if you place enough monkeys in front of enough typewriters for long enough, eventually one will produce the Iliad. Therefore, no performance, or even a series of performances, can be the results of anything but chance. There is no value in studying the past of anything, everything is random and nothing about the past can provide any insight into the future. Spend your money on something by Paul Krugman.
Rating:
Summary: Very Opinionated, Very Iconoclastic and a lot of Fun
Review: This is not an academic book, not a textbook on statistics and certainly not an investment book. It is a very personal essay by someone who does not seem to take authority too seriously (including himself). Aside from Soros, Popper, and Hume he has no gods and tends to overtly despise other people's gods. Sometimes he goes too far, as he does with Hegel, Will, the Wall Street CEOs, etc.
This book is very very readable. I read it in almost one sitting.
I find it autobiographical not egocentric. But I also find it at times scathing.
Taleb is extremely opinionated, certainly not someone I would like to have as a boss. But he keeps taking jabs at himself. That is courageous.
I bought and distributed 20 copies of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Any trader should READ
Review: Anyone associated with trading should read this pamphlet, as it points to many of the flaws and lies of modern finance. The lessons gathered by this very seasoned and contrarian trader are worth the price.
The main flaw is not in the book, but in the strategy of the author, which completely contradicts his thesis. Namely, if very few hedge funds follow this strategy, there must be a reason. The reason is that the author/hedge fund operator forgot that the success of his trading strategy is very "random", to use his favorite word. Because that strategy only works if a severe financial crisis happens sooner than later (in the next few years), otherwise all his investors will have pull out after bleeding money month after month. The author will absolutely agree that the occurence of the next financial crisis is "random", and could very well happen ten years from now. To use another of his favorite terms, this is a path dependent strategy.
As the author wrote with total deference to the master, George Soros, successful traders are the ones who can change their opinion very fast. This is the exact opposite of what the author does, as he ALWAYS buy volatility, thus NEVER changing his opinion. The idea of selling is taboo to him, so let's see if the law of the survival of the less fit will apply to him.
If it does, he will look like a hero, otherwise this book will be the testimony of his self avowed incompetency.
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth reading
Review: "Fooled by Randomness" is a thought-provoking tale about the role of chance in choosing winners and losers in the markets. Taleb extends his lessons to somewhat broader avenues of life, but the strength of the book is in conveying the basics of his view of quantitative finance. His discussions of the limitations human emotions put on trading rationally and how social context determines ones notion of success are also very good. While Taleb has some clearly valid criticisms to make of academic financial theories, it should be pointed out that the assumption underlying his own trading strategy - that of obtaining larger gains when betting on rare events than losses when betting against likely events - may also change. One needs to understand that models and theories are approximations to the truth. His statement that Newtonian physics is "wrong" gets to the heart of the matter. High-rise buildings are designed just fine without general relativity. In this context, Newton's laws are as right as they need to be. And insofar as the context of Black-Scholes type models hold, they are useful as well and provide something for further theory to build upon. That widespread use of strategies based on a financial model in turn changes the system that was originally modeled is a unique pitfall that also needs notice. "Fooled by Randomness" is somewhat meandering, but I nonetheless found the book to flow quite fluidly. I enjoyed his writing style, even if he was at times a bit pompous (I particularly liked his use of George Will as a whipping boy.) As a non-quantitative book, "Fooled by Randomness" is an accessible way to hear the worthwhile things Taleb has to say.
Rating:
Summary: Refreshing narrative on randomess
Review: First of all my opinion of this book does not take into account those who haven't read this book. One of the central themes of this text is the role that events outside the Venn diagram (so to speak) have on our lives and in Taleb's case on his financial career. Die hard theorists who live by the assumption of everything being "i.i.d." will not like this book. The only thing I would've like is more detail on his use of Monte Carlo methods and methodology.
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing Ideas, Horribly Presented
Review: There is no question that Taleb is a brilliant man. That is clear from just reading a few pages from the book. If you don't know what concepts like "stationarity," "data mining," "the black swan problem" are, then you should read this book--they are very relevent to your investing life, and not usually discussed in the context of finance. Unfortunately, Taleb's brilliance does not extend to the quality of his presentation. This book contains, simply put, the most horrendous presentation of sound ideas I have ever seen. Taleb barely introduces one topic when he jumps to the next, with no real order. Dozens of personal anecdotes seem to be entirely pointless and irrelevent to the topic at hand. If they have any relevence, at least, Taleb leaves it for the reader to find out. Worst of all, almost all of his points are simply asserted; he provides no argument for them at all. Rather, he seems to be of the opinion that they are simply self-evident, and are not in need of any supporting argument, which is simply not the case. Several times in the book, Taleb comments upon how unconventional his ideas are, which is true, and which is why you should read the book, despite all I have said. (His ideas really are intriguing.) Unfortunately, he seems to be of the opinion that if you have unconventional ideas, you should also present them in an unconventional fashion. I believe the opposite is true: the more unconventional your ideas are, the more conventional your presentation of them should be, lest readers dismiss you right off the bat, as I'm sure many did, understandably. This book seems to have lacked an editor. If it was editied, whoever edited it should find a different profession, because no editor worth her salt would let such a disorganized manuscript pass through her office without doing some serious foundation work on it.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't really deliver . . .
Review: I bought this book because a review said it presented the case for two things that I have long believe are both true and important: randomness plays a very much larger role in our lives and in our apparent success than most people think (especially in the financial world!), and the role of very rare and improbable but quite significant events ("outliers") can be much more important than many people understand. (As someone once said, "Never underestimate the simple pleasure people derive from being told things that they already believe are true") Those are indeed primary themes argued in this book -- but I was expecting to see some real data, some solid statistical arguments and examples to support these claims, and the book doesn't deliver on this. Lots of semi-pointless little anecdotes, lots of discursive comments and equally semi-pointless notes about the author himself, but very little or no hard content. As the author himself says in the Preface about how he went about writing the book, "Everything that remotely felt like work was out". Too true!! -- and the book clearly shows it. I don't begrudge purchasing the book, if only for the novel (to me anyway) concept of the "Inverse Turing Test" on page 62. The original Turing test addresses the issue of whether a computer can ever be called intelligent, and says that a computer (or an AI program) should be considered intelligent if a human exchanging messages with it over an electronic link really can't tell for sure whether there's a human or a computer at the other end. The Inverse Turing Test starts with the persuasive assertion that a computer running a random or Monte Carlo process can't possibly be intelligent. It follows that if a program like this, simply by stringing together stock phrases in accordance with simple syntax rules, can generate documents -- say a typical business speech, report from a stock analyst, or Derrida philosophical treatise -- that other humans cannot distinguish from real examples of the same category written by human authors, then neither the computer nor the human authors are exhibiting any intelligence. (No such Monte Carlo program could ever write a valid scientific journal article, because writing scientific articles does require intelligence.) Hadn't heard that argument before, and it's very entertaining -- perhaps because there's so much truth in it. Anyway, this book is a light-weight, and won't go in my permanent library.
Rating:
Summary: the unbearable lightness of luck and track record
Review: The author ought to be congratulated for mounting a forceful attack on the conventional wisdom of using a so-called track record to corroborate financial acumen and investing genius, of which the irredeemably enamoured Wall Street and the mass media are the major exponents. The lucid prose makes the book at once perspicacious and sardonically humorous. From the Bayesian perspective, it is all but a philosophical impossibility to let the "data speak for themselves" when dealing with uncertainties. One needs to have a prior, which is best elicited by the appreciation of the contingent nature of life, one of the infinite manifestations of which is the financial market.
Rating:
Summary: Introspective
Review: If the author feels superior to his peers, it is only because, like Soros, he thinks that he is fallible while they think that they are intelligent and great. It is this attitude that one cannot fail to admire.
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