Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Statistics and investing...

From Nassim Taleb in Fooled By Randomness:
If the science of statistics can benefit me in anything, I will use it. If it poses a threat, then I will not. I want to take the best of what the past can give me without its dangers. Accordingly, I will use statistics and inductive methods to make aggressive bets, but I will not use them to manage my risks and exposure. Surprisingly, all the surviving traders I know seem to have done the same. They trade on ideas based on some observation (that includes past history) but, like the Popperian scientists, they make sure the costs of being wrong are limited (and their probability is not derived from past data).