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A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them.

In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor.

Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways.

Marks expounds on such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Frankly and honestly assessing his own decisions--and occasional missteps--he provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be "contrarian," Marks wisely judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of Marks's subjects proves to be the most important thing.

"This is that rarity, a useful book."--Warren Buffett

This book explores the problem of high frequency trading (HFT) as well as the need for US stock market reform. This collection of previously published and unpublished materials includes the following articles and white papers:

1. The Problem of HFT
2. HFT Scalping Strategies
3. Why HFTs Have an Advantage
4. HFT - A Systemic Issue
5. Electronic Liquidity Strategy
6. Reforming the National Market Syste
7. NZZ Interview with Haim Bodek
8. TradeTech Interview with Haim Bodek

Trading for a Living Successful trading is based on three M's: Mind, Method, and Money. Trading for a Living helps you master all of those three areas:

* How to become a cool, calm, and collected trader
* How to profit from reading the behavior of the market crowd
* How to use a computer to find good trades
* How to develop a powerful trading system
* How to find the trades with the best odds of success
* How to find entry and exit points, set stops, and take profits

Trading for a Living helps you discipline your Mind, shows you the Methods for trading the markets, and shows you how to manage Money in your trading accounts so that no string of losses can kick you out of the game. To help you profit even more from the ideas in Trading for a Living, look for the companion volume--Study Guide for Trading for a Living. It asks over 200 multiple-choice questions, with answers and 11 rating scales for sharpening your trading skills.

For example: Question Markets rise when

* there are more buyers than sellers
* buyers are more aggressive than sellers
* sellers are afraid and demand a premium
* more shares or contracts are bought than sold

* I and II
* II and III
* II and IV
* III and IV

Answer B. II and III. Every change in price reflects what happens in the battle between bulls and bears. Markets rise when bulls feel more strongly than bears. They rally when buyers are confident and sellers demand a premium for participating in the game that is going against them. There is a buyer and a seller behind every transaction. The number of stocks or futures bought and sold is equal by definition.

This book is about trading, the people who trade securities and contracts, the marketplaces where they trade, and the rules that govern it. Readers will learn about investors, brokers, dealers, arbitrageurs, retail traders, day traders, rogue traders, and gamblers; exchanges, boards of trade, dealer networks, ECNs (electronic communications networks), crossing markets, and pink sheets. Also covered in this text are single price auctions, open outcry auctions, and brokered markets limit orders, market orders, and stop orders. Finally, the author covers the areas of program trades, block trades, and short trades, price priority, time precedence, public order precedence, and display precedence, insider trading, scalping, and bluffing, and investing, speculating, and gambling.

The way in which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. Market Liquidity offers a more accurate and authoritative take on liquidity and price discovery. The authors start from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that even the limited number of participants who are have quite diverse information about the security's fundamentals. As a result, the order flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus a security's actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors.

This book takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. The authors draw on a vast body of theoretical insights and empirical findings on security price formation that have accumulated in the last thirty years, and have come to form a well-defined field within financial economics known as "market microstructure." Focusing on liquidity and price discovery, they analyze the tension between the two, pointing out that when price-relevant information reaches the market through trading pressure rather than through a public announcement, liquidity suffers.

New edition of book that demystifies quant and algo trading. In this updated edition of his bestselling book, Rishi K Narang offers in a straightforward, nontechnical style—supplemented by real-world examples and informative anecdotes—a reliable resource takes you on a detailed tour through the black box. He skillfully sheds light upon the work that quants do, lifting the veil of mystery around quantitative trading and allowing anyone interested in doing so to understand quants and their strategies. This new edition includes information on High Frequency Trading.

Offers an update on the bestselling book for explaining in non-mathematical terms what quant and algo trading are and how they work. Provides key information for investors to evaluate the best hedge fund investments. Explains how quant strategies fit into a portfolio, why they are valuable, and how to evaluate a quant manager. This new edition of Inside the Black Box explains quant investing without the jargon and goes a long way toward educating investment professionals.

An innovative guide that identifies what distinguishes the best financial risk takers from the rest

Why do some products capture our attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain things out of sheer habit? Is there an underlying pattern to how technologies hook us?

Bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Designed to bridge the gap between theory and practice, this introductory text on the futures and options markets is ideal for those with a limited background in mathematics.

In Hooked, Nir Eyal reveals how successful companies create products people can't put down - and how you can too

Designed to bridge the gap between theory and practice, this introductory text on the futures and options markets is ideal for those with a limited background in mathematics.