Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous Synthesis:
Review: Taleb brilliantly weaves together ideas from many disciplines. A must read for anyone seeking a perspective on the topic.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful lessons
Review: Taleb's book is a playful critique of conventional wisdom. Perhaps those smarty pants in the financial markets are just lucky; while some of us are the inverse. These are serious lessons too.
Rating:
Summary: crazy, pompous, irreverent, self-indulgent but FUN
Review: the author sometimes gets off the rack in criticizing everyone in sight...but he may be right. Anyway a lot of fun to go thru the pages. Worth the plane ride I spent reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: More Ego than useful info
Review: This book is just the ramblings of a smart successful trader who obviously got bored and wanted to write a book. He speaks more of his philosophical thoughts on random subjects than he does on the math used in his trading system. If you are looking for a good book on trading - this is not it. It doesn't explain any trading system or any techniques used. The math examples aren't more complicated than - there are 100 marbles and 50 are blue and 50 are white....Taleb is obviously a smart man...too smart for his own good. He tells of how his thinking procludes him from investing in anything but T-Bills because of the mere randomness of the stock market. According to him everything is random. From successful traders to successful CEO's. Hard work and work ethic are wastes of time due to the random nature of everything. Most traders got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, except him of course. This book is full of ego and personal stories and thoughts from the author, not well organized I might add. One last example tells it all: He is so smart he can't see the simple premice behind the book "The Millionaire Next Door". It basically says that the consumers of the world are not the rich, but rather the guy next door driving his 5 year old car with cash in the bank is the millionaire. It says that savers build wealth and spenders just consume debt. Simple and true. Taleb goes on to say how wrong this study is and how rich people are chosen at random like lottery winners. Taleb is the kind of guy you could not enjoy a conversation with for he would be constantly showing off his superior intelect. The book does have some interesting points and isn't a total waste of time. If you can ignore all the ego in between.
Rating: 
Summary: Great but a few things missing
Review: Great book. I give it 4 stars. Thsi is what it would take for more:
A- Bayesian probability a little more formally presented than the simplistic doctor's example
B- More discussions of behavioral science
C- A little more on Hume's skepticism
D- More formal links to the history of probability.
This is constructive ciriticism. The writer is immensely gifted and can ENTERTAIN. But it takes more than that. He should put in a little more--go the extra mile, Taleb.
Rating:
Summary: Timely reminder highly appreciated
Review: Thought provocating, especially if you are in the trading / money mgt. biz, and have to live through risks everyday and yet would love to see big fat returns. I feel more humbled by being reminded that just being right is not everything - it may be pure survivorship bias. It's probably a guide to smart LT survival in the biz without risking being caught in "game over" scenario.
Rating:
Summary: Investors take note
Review: This is a rare book that reduces the complexity of trading, business, and even life to its core elements. Most putatively successful business people are just damn lucky, and financial managers are often enriched while their investors lose. It is a sobering, enlightening, and a highly amusing work.
Rating:
Summary: A work of...
Review: As someone wrote before: "it is personal, idiosyncratic, confused, decorative, hyperbolic, narcissistic, unfocused...in brief it is a work of genius".
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: Nassim Taleb makes some interesting points about how we misinterpret information. Many of the expamples could be given in a basic probabilty and statistics course, but he presents the arguments in an entertaining fashion.
Rating: 
Summary: Too smart for his own good
Review: An obviosly smart man who was dying to write a book - he says "I didn't want writing this book to feel like work, it must flow freely from my thoughts." Well - it shows. For a book on probability the examples never get in more depth than 'there are 100 marbles in a jar - 55 are black and 45 are red'. He changes subjects from psycology to probability to his personal feelings. Talks of his grand career and how smart he is - while constantly putting down everyone else. Claims randomness is the only reason for anything to happen - nothing has any basis in fundamentals or news/world events - it's all random. He "watches the depressed losers on the train reading their wall st journals every morning", which is completely uselss in his opinion. I love how he claims his conservative strategy made him so much money and how since the stock market is random the only thing he would ever put he earnings in were treasury bonds. While everyone else was getting rich in the bull market and getting lucky. Then he rips the book "the millionaire next door" because of its wrong thesis that the rich are the savers and not the guy with the 2 BMW's and huge house. It is a basic book with the underlying theme that saving and not consuming will make you rich - hence - joe next door driving his work van is richer than luke who goes into debt to impress the neighboorhood with his luxury items. He sort of preached this early on as he was living in the shadow of a trader who was way richer than him - who he wished would blow up because his profits were the result of luck rather than skill. He was irked by this guy but happy to have the small house and money in t bills. He is so smart he can't realize this other book is simply saying not to be a huge consumer and to save - but he sees this theory as ridiculous because randomness is what makes one rich or not - except in his case because his theory is correct as opposed to all the other lucky traders. there is nothing to take from this book to apply to trading and it isn't more than a compilation of a rich, bored, intelectual wanting to write a book. It does delve into the minds of some great thinkers like soros, and other philosophers and shows that as smart as they are they can still be fooled by randomness. I think he thinks he is in their class when he clearly is not. Worth taking out of the library but not wasting any money on.
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