Yesterday, I finished Taleb´s new book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I find it is very similar (but not superior) to Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. In fact, it is more of the same: how difficult is to forecast even by "experts", how most of the financial theory is based upon a normal distribution while anyone can prove it is not, how our own way of thinking disperses the truth, how we must be prepared to unpredictable forces that can change all the basics...
But he is not generous enough in the sense that he does not show clearly how one can profit from his way of thinking.
In any case, before reading it, I strongly agreed with his Mandelbrotian point of view. Investors usually realize that, even though common statistics say financial markets are not that dangerous, stocks are awfully difficult, so people spend less money there than what it is supposed if stats were true.
Finally, I see our interaction with the markets as "small bets". We try to get a nice risk-reward binomy, but realizing that we need surprises, rebounds, long trends, etc. It helped me a lot to start working on sports wagers to understand intraday trading.
