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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bull_dozer who wrote (127126)	6/5/2008 11:02:30 AM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 306849

Taleb is one of my favorite authors. Very few can make statistics interesting to read about. And he is one of the few who will note that successful investors are usually lucky, not brilliant. There are exceptions, but they are the statistical outliers. How many times have we seen the crowd chase a successful fund manager or commodity speculator, only to have that hero fall on his face in the next year or so? Of course, the fact that the hero now has much more money to manage than he had when he scored big is part of the problem. But the other part is that the guy probably got lucky at the start of some trend and such trend died out or even reversed, and he didn't switch trains in Kansas City. The 90/10 is the king, IMHO. At least it is when safe interest rates are a hell of a lot higher than they are now. In fact, it is hard to find "safe" interest rates at any rate. Remember when AAA mortgages were super safe? The 10% part of the equation is supposed to take all of your time, but I find myself spending more and more time finding the 90%. BTW, I love black swans. We used to have a pair out at one of the restaurants in Houston, named The Black Swan, coincidentally. <VBG> It's since changed ownership and name and I haven't been back to see my friends in a few years. Hope they had babies and weren't prejudiced if they came out white.