LOSING ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY. Kids, I was in an economics class with a man (Victor Niederhoffer) who went on to lose one hundred thirty million dollars in a day. (He would have lost more, but one hundred thirty million dollars was all he had to invest). He was evidently brilliant—it was a graduate school class in economics and he was an undergraduate. He went on to be a very successful investor (unsuccessful investors never get the opportunity to lose that much money just as only good pitchers get the chance to lose twenty games in a year). Malcolm Gladwell tells the story here of how he lost the one hundred thirty million dollars. Gladwell’s article is built around the intellectual conflict between two erudite professional speculators who have diametrically opposed world views. The two are Victor Niederhoffer and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who writes about Black Swans.
[...] PITCHERS WITH BAD RESULTS. I remarked here that only good pitchers get a chance to lose twenty games in a year. Now Nick has posted an article [...]
[...] people don’t risk loss on the scale of Long Term Capital Management or for that matter risk the loss of an entire $130 million dollar fund unless they think that the risk of loss is so small that it can be [...]
[...] ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY—UPDATE. Almost one month ago I posted on how the brilliant speculator Victor Niederhoffer had once lost one hundred thirty million [...]