Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past. And who knows whether that will be true? So all of Taleb's personal wealth, and the hundreds of millions that Empirica has in reserve, is in Treasury bills. Few on Wall Street have taken the practice of buying options to such extremes. But if anything completely outo f the ordinary happens to the stock market, if some random event sends a jolt through all of Wall Street and pushes GM to, say, $20, Nassim Taleb will not end up in a dowdy apartment in Athens. He will be rich.
--Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
You probably need to break down it down a little bit more. It is exquisitely beautiful. Hope others visit it regularly.
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